cm 

m)D IS ijoc 



josepR asooD 




Class. 



! ! 



Book__AA/fe5 



THE BIBLE— WHAT IT IS AND IS NOT 



THE BIBLE 



WHAT IT IS AND IS NOT 



BY 



JOSEPH WOOD 




BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1907 



^'^V'^ 



^ "of 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The Great Bibles of the World . 9 

II. The Authorized Version ... 24 

III. The Text and the Canon . . 38 

IV. The Revised Version ... 56 
V. Infallibility 73 

VI. Inspiration 87 

VII. Mistakes in the Bible . . . 106 

VIII. Evolution in the Bible. — I. God . 123 

IX. Evolution IN THE Bible. —II. Man . 142 

X. Evolution IN THE Bible. — III. Morality 157 

XI. The Religion of the Bible . . 173 
XII. What is left apart from Myth and 

Miracle ? 189 

XIII. The Right Use and Interpretation 

OF THE Bible .... 204 

XIV. The Higher Criticism . . . 217 



THE GREAT BIBLES OF THE WORLD 

Few things are more important to the progress 
of a reasonable reUgion than right views about 
the Bible. Foolish claims are made for the Bible 
which it does not make for itself. It nowhere 
claims to be an infallible book ; it does not assert 
what many of its ignorant admirers assert, that 
every chapter, every verse, every word, is verbal!}'- 
inspired. These claims have done it great injury, 
because many men having come to see that 
they cannot be sustained, have jumped to the 
equally false conclusion that none of the claims 
of the Bible on our reverence are worthy of atten- 
tion. The Bible has been wounded in the house 
of its friends. I beheve if right views about the 
Bible prevailed, and if the truth about the Bible 
were generally known, scepticism would be robbed 
of many of its favourite arguments and mockeries. 
It is because good men go on contending for 
theories about the Bible which will no longer 



10 THE GREAT BIBLES OF THE WORLD 

hold water that it is possible for scepticism to 
go on throwing ridicule upon the Bible. Half 
the sneers, and more than half the arguments 
against the Bible heard in our secular halls proceed 
upon the ground that Christians claim the Bible 
to be infallible. Once let it be known that 
Christians study the Bible as they do any other 
great book ; that they believe in its human origin ; 
that they know it to contain mistakes ; that they 
value it not for its myths and miracles but for 
its moral and spiritual records and teaching, 
and the sceptic will be robbed of half his weapons. 
More than that, the intellect and conscience 
of many a good man would be immensely relieved 
if only he felt he might read the Bible in a reason- 
able way, and were not bound to believe that it 
teaches science, or is never mistaken in its 
histories, figures, dates, or even precepts. 

What I wish to bring home to you in these 
lectures is the real and priceless value of the Bible. 
But it is folly to think that to get people to value 
the Bible we must hide the truth about it. Every 
scholar, every minister of religion, now knows 
that the Bible is not free from taint of human 
error ; but there are many who seem to think 
that this can be kept from the people, and that it 
is unwise to let everybody know it. 

What a miserable faith in religion we must 
have if we think it can ever be injured by the 



KNOWLEDGE OF TRUTH II 

knowledge of truth ! On what a very sandy and 
insecure foundation Christianity must rest if, 
in order to preserve it as a temple for ourselves 
and our children, we must cry ' Hush ! ' when 
it is proposed to tell people the simple, exact, 
ascertained facts about the Bible. Besides, it 
is perfectly useless to try and keep them from 
the common people. They leak out in newspapers ; 
they are the subject of articles in cheap and 
popular magazines ; they turn up in social discus- 
sion ; and if Christian teachers fail to present 
them to the public, they get presented with a 
highly unfavourable bias by secularist writers. 
Why should we fear to discover and make known 
the truth about the Bible or about anything 
else ? It has been gravely urged that the results 
of modern Biblical criticism should only be 
pubhshed in the Latin language, so that the minds 
of ordinary people should not be disturbed by 
that which is the peculiar preserve of scholars. 
Let us have done with such moral cowardice. 
As Bishop Butler said, ' Things are what they are, 
and the results will he what they will he."" Why, 
then, should we try to make believe otherwise ? 
Yet when a preacher tries to show the people the 
truth about the Bible ; tells them honestly that 
the science of the Bible is incorrect ; that the 
morality of the Pentateuch is defective ; that no 
scholar believes Paul to have written the Epistle 



12 THE GREAT BIBLES OF THE WORLD 

to the Hebrews ; that the numbers in Exodus 
are grossly exaggerated ; many people are alarmed, 
as if, when we begin to remove the dirt from an 
old master, we were going to destroy the glorious 
picture itself. But we remove the dirt with which 
it has become encrusted that the picture may 
be more clearly seen and better appreciated than 
before. So if we apply an honest and searching 
criticism to the Bible we shall clear away many 
errors and mistakes that have hitherto obscured 
much of its teaching, and the truth of God that 
is in it will shine out more purely and clearly 
than ever. 

* Oh,' but it is said, ' you must not unsettle 
men's minds ; the old views do no harm, and 
it is not safe to set men questioning.' On the 
contrary, I believe in provoking men to ask 
questions, and I do not believe that the old views 
do no harm. To believe that the Bible is 
miraculously inspired and the infallible word 
of God, if it be not so, is not an innocent belief, 
a harmless faith. It is something that stands in 
the way of religious progress, more than anything 
else of which we can conceive. And as to un- 
settling men's minds about the Bible, that 
mischief, if it be a mischief, is already done. 
Reasonable opinions about the Bible are in the 
air ; they are like floating seeds, you cannot 
control their flight. Shut them out at the front 



RESULTS OF WIDER KNOWLEDGE I3 

door, and they will float in at the window ; sweep 
them from your dwelling, and they will spring up 
in your garden. And if you let the people go on 
believing a lie, the people will find you out in a 
few years ; and then where wdll your religious 
influence be ? Be not afraid. The truth about 
the Bible must be good for religion and not ill. 
Do not be afraid of these reasonable views, and 
remember how much you injure the Bible by 
claiming for it what it does not claim for itself. 
You do not add to the value of a loaf of bread by 
declaring that it will quench thirst ; you do not 
increase the pleasure you receive from a rose in 
June by asserting that its scent will cure a bad 
toothache ; you do not draw out the true meaning 
of a great picture or a beautiful landscape by 
ascribing to it a didactic purpose ; and you do 
not enhance the Bible by makirg for it unfounded 
claims, or strengthen its hold on the human heart 
by wrong assumptions as to its origin and character. 
It is one of the results of the widening know- 
ledge of the last hundred years that nations, 
races, and religions know a deal more of each 
other than at any previous time in the world's 
history. When nations lived without much 
communication, it was possible for each to think 
that it was the race specially favoured of heaven, 
and that its religion contained the whole truth 
of God. But this faith is shaken when we come 



14 THE GREAT BIBLES OF THE WORLD 

to know our neighbours better. The Moham- 
medans have the profoundest beHef in the Koran 
as the only Bible for man. You know the story 
of the Mohammedan caHph at the burning of 
the great Ubrary of Alexandria. ' If these hooks 
agree with the Koran, we do not need them ; if not, 
they are false. So in any case let them he destroyed,'' 
The Buddhists have the same reverence for 
Buddha and for their sacred books that we have 
for Jesus Christ and the Bible. It is now seen 
that each nation has been guided by God, and 
that no part of the world has been left without 
light from, heaven. There have been inspired 
men in all great races since the world began. 
Each nation has received a fragment of truth. 
Each nation has made the mistake of supposing 
its fragment to be the one and only divine and 
complete system of religion.. It has written 
its Bible, and supposed that here was the closed 
book of the revelation of God, and the final deposit 
of Eternal Truth. Now, this belief could easily 
be held by any nation so long as it was isolated, 
so long as the nations knew very little of each 
other. It is only within the last century that 
many of the great systems of ancient and eastern 
religion have been opened up to the life and 
thought of the modern western world. 

But just as we have learned that Europeans 
are not the only civilized peoples — that in Japan, 



TRUTH IN ALL RELIGIONS I5 

for instance, a noble civilization and a noble art 
existed long before ours — so we have learned 
that the religions of the great races are not all 
false while ours is the only true, but that there 
is ranch that is akin to our rehgion in many 
other lands. We have learned that our experience 
has not been unique. We have learned that 
other peoples have passed through similar phases 
of growth and have arrived at similar conclusions ; 
that they have discovered similar truths concern- 
ing God and man, similar principles of right and 
wrong. We have learned that they have Bibles 
of their own which they think came by special 
inspiration and are infallible just as we think 
ours, and that they have set themselves up 
as exclusive possessors of truth as we have 
done. Do not mistake me. I am not putting 
these other reHgions and Bibles on the same 
level as Christianity and the New Testament. 
In all nations there have been true prophets 
inspired of God ; but in no other nation have 
they been so conspicuous or reached such a 
high level of inspiration as among the Jews. 
To take the analogous case of art : we know that 
all the great nations have developed artistic 
powers ; yet I do not hesitate to say that in 
one race especially has the artistic faculty been 
so prominent as to make it an authority on 
art for all the rest. As Greece was specially 



l6 THE GREAT BIBLES OF THE WORLD 

endowed with the artistic nature, so the Jews 
were specially endowed with the rehgious nature. 
For while the science of Comparative Religion 
has shown that there are half a dozen Bibles 
in the world, each containing much that is 
beautiful and true, it has also shown the immense 
superiority of the Christian over all other sacred 
scriptures. Other Bibles may contain isolated 
sentences of equal or greater significance, but 
they have no such average beauty and value. 
In admitting the inspiration of other prophets 
besides the Jewish, and of other Bibles than ours, 
I am not detracting from ours. I do not detract 
from the Alps by calling Snowdon a mountain. 
I do not dim the glory of the rose by calling the 
marsh-marigold a flower. I do not narrow the 
Thames by calling the Tamar a river. No, nor 
any more will the supreme spiritual inspiration 
of the Jewish prophets suffer depreciation through 
a frank acknowledgment of a true, although 
inferior, inspiration elsewhere. 

What are the great Bibles of the world ? They 
are six in number : — 

I. — The Vedas of the Brahmins. 

2. — The Zend-Avesta of the Parsees or Persians. 

3. — The Tripitika of the Buddhists. 

4. — The Chinese Sacred Books. 

5. — The Mohammedan Koran. 

6. — The Jewish and Christian Scriptures. 



THE VEDAS AND ZEND-AVESTA \J 

There are other sacred books in the world, 
but these are the most important. Every one 
of these Bibles would be an interesting subject 
for a lecture. We must now be content with a 
few words about each. 

1. The Vedas of the Brahmins are the sacred 
books of Hinduism. They include various collec- 
tions of hymns chanted at religious services and 
sacrifices, and Prof. Max Miiller tells us that they 
date from 1200 B.C. The Vedas are a vast national 
literature like our own Bible, but much larger. 
Like our own Bible they contain myths and 
miracles, psalms and prophetic utterances. We 
must remember that 120 millions of mankind 
reverence these Vedas as the word of God, and 
the Brahmins believe them to be so entirely 
the inspiration of God as to have existed in his 
mind before time began. ' Vedas ' means know- 
ledge, wisdom. 

2. Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of the 
Parsees, are ascribed to Zoroaster, the founder 
of the Parsee religion. He lived and taught 
more than 3000 years ago, and some of the 
noblest men in ancient history — Cyrus and Darius 
for instance — ^were his disciples. Zend-Avesta 
means ' scripture,' and the book was probably 
gathered together by Zoroaster from ancient 
traditions, myths, and hymns, to which he 
added many precepts of his own. It is not 



l8 THE GREAT BIBLES OF THE WORLD 

easy to over-estimate the importance of the 
Zend-Avesta as a guide to one of the noblest 
and purest of the ancient faiths. The Persians 
were worshippers of one god only. They declared 
the unity and indivisibility of the Divinity. 
The disciple is taught to be pure in thought 
and word and deed ; to be temperate, chaste^ 
and truthful, and to do all that will increase 
the welfare of mankind. Men are not to cringe 
before the powers of darkness or crouch before 
a tyrant ; they are to meet them upstanding 
and confound them by unending opposition and 
the charm of a holy life. It was the Persians 
who first clearly taught the immortality of 
the soul, a doctrine which did not appear among 
the Jews until they came into contact with 
Persian thought. 

3. The Tripitika of the Buddhists is the 
Bible of a religion which numbers more followers 
than any other faith in the world. It is an off- 
shoot from the ancient Hindu religion, and was 
founded by Buddha, a man of princely birth, 
who appeared 628 B.C. He is sometimes called 
Gautama, and sometimes Sakyamuni. For a 
beautiful picture of this noble man, likest to 
Christ of all ancient teachers, I advise you to 
read Mr. Rhys David's little book on Buddhism, 
and Edwin Arnold's great poem, ' The Light of 
Asia.' The Buddhist scriptures are called the 



BUDDHIST AND CHINESE BOOKS I9 

* Tripitika,' or ' three baskets,' being in three 
parts. The first ' pitika/ or basket, contains 
rules of discipHne ; the second, the discourses 
of Buddha ; and the third treats of philosophy 
and the subtle mysteries of religion. The words 
of Buddha, handed on from age to age, and 
preserved at first solely in men's memories, were 
at last set down in writing. Much is in the 
Tripitika which Buddha never uttered ; but 
they are regarded as we regard our Bible. 
Buddhism was the state religion in India 
for nine centuries ; it is one of the religions of 
China ; it is the religion of Tibet, of Japan and 
Ceylon ; and the Tripitika, like the Bible, has been 
freely translated out of the original into many 
of the languages of the east. With its com- 
mentaries, it forms an immense Hterature, five 
or six times as large as our Bible. The central 
idea of Buddhism is the salvation of the soul 
from evil, and from the changes of life by 
contemplation of truth and goodness, and finally 
by absorption of the individual in universal 
Being. 

4. The Chinese Sacred Books. ' The Five 
Kings ' and ' The Four Shoo,' consist of ancient 
hymns, myths, etc., brought together by Confucius 
and enlarged by his own discourses. This great 
soul, who was reviled in life, but whose influence 
now sways the hundreds of millions of China, 



20 THE GREAT BIBLES OF THE WORLD 

was bom 531 B.C., a few years before the death 
of Buddha. The sacred books he edited are 
called * Kings,' the warp threads of a web. The 
name signifies that which is woven together, 
like the use of our word ' text,' from the Latin 
* textum ' — that which is woven. These books 
teach that there is one supreme Being everywhere 
present, all-seeing, who commands pure thoughts, 
right deeds, and watchfulness of tongue. They 
teach a reverence for the past which in many 
respects is slavish ; but they also teach a duty 
to the present which makes the Chinese one of 
the most orderly and law-abiding people on the 
earth. 

5. The Koran, the Bible of Islam, is the work 
of Mohammed, and consists of extracts and stories 
from the Jewish Scriptures, together with a 
large number of Eastern legends, and Moham- 
med's own dreams and sayings. ' Islam ' — ' the 
righteous man ' — is the youngest of the great 
religions of the world ; and hence we are able 
to see how its first simple teaching became overlaid 
with myths and foolish superstitions. For ex- 
ample, although Mohammed came into the world 
like other children, wonderful things were said 
to have taken place at his birth : one legend 
relating that the angels took him from the arms 
of his nurse, drew his heart from his bosom, 
and then squeezed from it the black drop of 



POINTS OF LIKENESS 21 

original sin which is in every child of Adara. 
He was bom 571 years after Christ, and rose 
from a camel-driver to be one of the greatest 
forces of the world. He preached for forty years 
the great truth ' La Ellah Ellah ' — ' there is no 
god but God.' That God is one, and not three, 
is the great doctrine of the Koran ; and next 
in order is taught submission to God's will. 
Koran means ' the reading.' 

I have no time to show you the many points 
of likeness to be found in these various Bibles ; 
how they all abound in stories of miracles ; how 
they teach the same rites and sacrifices ; how 
the ideas of immaculate conceptions and virgin 
mothers are common to other religions and 
Bibles as well as our own ; how the Messianic 
idea, too, is found in the Vedas and in the Chinese 
Scriptures ; how even the same ceremonies are 
enjoined, so that when the first Christian mis- 
sionaries went among the Buddhists, they were 
surprised to find a rehgion so much resembling 
their own in its rites and ceremonies, even to the 
shaven crown of the priest and use of a rosary, 
and they could only account for the resemblance 
by supposing that the devil had forestalled God 
by coming there ahead of him and setting up a 
counterfeit as much like Christianity as possible. 
But I might show you more. I might show 
profounder resemblances : how all teach purity, 



22 THE GREAT BIBLES OF THE WORLD 

mercifulness, justice, contempt of riches, humility ; 
so that neither faith, nor love, nor truth, nor 
disinterestedness, nor forgiveness of injuries, nor 
patience, nor prayer, nor the sentiment of 
brotherhood is monopolized by any form of 
faith. They are taught in all the great Bibles 
of the world. 

I do not say they are taught as nobly and 
clearly as in our own. I am not claiming that 
all the great Bibles of the world stand on the 
same level ; or that their teachings are identical. 
Mingled with much that is true and beautiful, 
these Bibles have much in them that is degrading, 
foolish, and superstitious. What I affirm is 
simply this : that from the furthest east to the 
remotest western horizon, God, by whatever 
name he has been called, has been present with 
his kindling light, and that in many races outside 
the Jewish pale he has raised up true prophets 
for himself, who have spoken such words of 
grace and truth that they have greatly moved 
the hearts of men, have been the power of God 
unto better things, have been carefully remembered 
by grateful disciples, and finally enshrined in 
sacred books. This fact is the basis of the great 
and modem science of Comparative Religion. 
Every one of these sacred books has an admixture 
of earthy matter ; every one contains gleams of 
heavenly wisdom ; every one has helped to purify 



ALL THAT IS GOOD FROM GOD 23 

the great stream of human hfe as it flows down 
to the sea. 

Children of men ! the unseen Power, whose eye 
For ever doth accompany mankind. 
Hath looken on no reUgion scornfully 
That ever man did find. 

Which has not taught weak wills how much they can ? 
WTiich has not fall'n on the dry heart Hke rain ? 
Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man : 
Thou must be bom again ? 

These various rehgions will not acknowledge 
each other ; each claims to have a monopoly of 
God and truth ; each has denied that religion 
could have any fountains beyond its own saints 
and prophets. But whatever has been of vital 
power in each — and they would not have lasted 
so long had they been wholly false — has come 
from the same source, the inspiration of the 
Almighty. God is now seen to have been, not 
the God of a tribe, a nation, or a church, but 
the God of the whole earth ; and although one 
people possessed the God-consciousness in striking 
superiority to all the rest, so that by their special 
endowment blessing might flow to all mankind, 
yet in every nation he that feared God and 
worked righteousness hath been accepted of him. 

All souls that struggle and aspire. 
Ail hearts of prayer by thee are Lit ; 

And, dim or clear, thy tongues of fire 
On dusky tribes and centuries sit. 



II 

THE AUTHORIZED VERSION 

We have seen that the Bible does not stand 
alone, but is one of a distinct class of books called 
the sacred books of the world. All the foremost 
religions of mankind have had sacred books 
which have been regarded with the same feelings 
of veneration that our own Bible inspires among 
us. This is not for one moment to say that one 
Bible is as good as another, or that all stand on 
one level. Snowdon is a mountain and the 
Matterhom is a mountain, but one is immeasur- 
ably loftier than the other. And the Bibles of 
the world differ in their value to the human race, 
differ in the nobility and inspiration to which 
they rise. Our own Bible is easily first, although 
perhaps not for the reasons generally assigned. 
Its superior divinity has for the most part 
engrossed the zeal of its defenders. But what 
I care for most is its superior humanity. 



OLD TESTAMENT HEROES 25 

Shakespeare is not a whit more human. What 
an insight it has into the human heart ! How 
it reveals to us the secret places of the human 
mind, and so reveals to us ourselves ! How, as 
it unfolds the great drama of humanity, are we 
shown that God is the educator of man ! Human 
life, as depicted in the Bible, is largely typical. 
Men lived boldly from within, and what they 
said and did had that broad human significance 
which forecasted what men would say and do 
to the end of time. How true to human nature 
is that mixture of good and evil we find in its 
heroes ! Popular theology would have us think 
of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and David as almost 
perfect in character, quite beyond anything 
which we see in our day. Popular scepticism 
flies to the other extreme, and can speak only of 
the deceitfulness of Jacob, and the adultery of 
David, asking with a sneer, ' What sort of a God 
is he when these are called men after his own 
heart ? ' Both are wrong. These men were by 
no means perfect, and the Bible never speaks 
of them in that way. They were terribly 
imperfect ; they fell, they were punished, and 
they carried the penalty of wrongdoing with 
them to their graves. But this is their glory : 
that they knew they were imperfect, and were 
not content ; they lifted themselves above the 
average morality of their day ; they made 



26 THE AUTHORIZED VERSION 

strenuous efforts after something nobler ; they 
were led on by God to higher levels than men 
had yet attained ; they were men who, in spite 
of their sins, still clung to the sense of God. The 
good that was in them was marred and debased 
by the alloy of selfish, base, and cruel elements ; 
and we are shown, as we are shown nowhere 
else, these two struggling with each other, the 
victory sometimes to the evil and sometimes 
to the good, yet on the whole, in the long run, 
the good prevaiHng. It is our own deceit we read 
in the story of Jacob ; it is our own shame and 
repentance we hear in the bitter cries of David. 
These men are not wax figures on which moral 
maxims are hung like suits of clothes made to 
the pattern we require. They are warm, living, 
human souls in whom we find our own experience. 
We see how Jacob's treachery found him out 
and was paid back in kind, and accompanied 
him, a dark shadow upon his life, all the days 
of his pilgrimage ; and we know from our own 
lives that we can never escape the consequences 
of any of our deeds. We listen to Job arraigning 
and challenging God, and we think we hear our 
own hearts speak in passionate trial. We hear 
Nathan saying unto David, ' Thou art the man,' 
and we know that Nathan stands just for our own 
accusing conscience. Whether the Bible be a 
divine book or not, it is certainly the greatest 



THE BOOK OF TWO RELIGIONS 27 

book of the human heart and of human Hfe 
ever written. 

It is the distinction of the Bible to be the 
sacred book of two great religions, the Jewish 
and the Christian. Consider what the Old Testa- 
ment has been to the Jewish people — a nation 
without a country now for eighteen centuries — 
in all their homeless wanderings. It was their 
consolation through a thousand years of Christian 
persecution. Consider, too, what the Bible has 
been to Protestant Christians, the charter of 
their freedom from the jurisdiction of the Pope ; 
an armoury of weapons against idolatry and 
priestly domination ; to French Huguenots and 
Scotch Covenanters and English Puritans, a 
nurse of heroes, teaching them many a song of 
battle, many a hope of final victory. 

Surely such a book, with such a history, and 
such a fame, and such intrinsic value, merits 
the most careful consideration. It has been before 
the world so long — its youngest chapters 1700 
years — and has been so much read and studied, 
that it would seem as if it ought to have been 
fairly comprehended long ago. But please re- 
member that until the Protestant Reformation 
the Bible was hidden from the common people 
in the priestly ark of an unspoken language. 
The common people have only been in possession 
of the Bible about four centuries. A little farther 



28 THE AUTHORIZED VERSION 

back the New Testament was assailed by monks 
and priests as an invention of the devil ; and 
even the scholarship which hung over the Bible 
before Erasmus was superstitious and uncritical 
to the last degree. Since then there has been a 
steady progress in the direction of a more 
scientific comprehension of its character ; and 
through the labours of a host of great and 
laborious scholars we are now in a better position 
to judge of the Bible, to separate the legendary from 
the historical, and the true from the erroneous, 
the gold from the rubble, than were even those who 
lived when its parts were first brought together 
into one book. And yet, so far as I can judge, the 
new criticism has made but very little impression 
upon the popular estimate of the Bible and the 
uses to which it is put. Even ministers who 
are acquainted with the new criticism, and 
substantially accept it, go on using the Bible 
as if nothing had happened, when something 
has happened of fundamental interest and im- 
portance. As for the average disciple in our 
Protestant communities, the Bible is for him 
what it was for his fathers. It is one book. 
Its parts are all of equal value. A text here 
is as good as a text there or anywhere else ; Old 
Testament as edifying as New ; the Book of 
Judges on the same level as the Epistle to the 
Philippians ; words taken out of their connexion 



THE DANGERS OF LITERALISM 29 

made to mean exactly the opposite of what was 
in the writer's mind ; the minutiae of Christian 
theology found in or read into the obscurities 
of Hebrew history. Dr. J. Mason Neale, the 
well-known hymn writer, has pubhshed a sermon 
on the text, ' Now therefore^ king, come down 
according to all the desire of thy soul to come down.''^ 
The literal sense of the passage, a petition of 
the Ziphites to Saul to come down that they 
may deliver David into his hand, is nowhere 
mentioned. It is applied to Christ's coming 
down, first in his incarnation ' from the crown 
of celestial majesty to the diadem of thorns,'' and 
secondly to his coming down in the Eucharist 
at the call of the priest ! Such a method of 
interpreting Scripture is both fanciful and 
frivolous. Or, take the words ' Touch not, taste 
not,'^ which are constantly quoted on temperance 
platforms as though they were an Apostolic 
injunction not even to hand to a neighbour a 
glass of wine. But these words are a popular 
saying of the ascetics which Paul quotes only 
to condemn. He reproaches those who are subject 
to such rules and ordinances. The text is made 
to mean exactly the contrary of what the Apostle 
taught. These are only two instances of the 
misuse of the Bible out of thousands that might 
be given. 

^ Sam. xxiii. 20. 2 Col. ii. 21. 



30 THE AUTHORIZED VERSION 

What then have we in our Authorized Version 
of the Bible ? First notice the title. The Bible, 
that is to say, The Book. But this title is a very 
modem one. It is only within recent centuries 
it has gone by this name — ' the book ' in the 
singular number. Five hundred years ago the 
Bible was not called ' Ton Bihliofiy the book, 
but * Ta Bihlia,^ the books — a much exacter 
designation ; one which, if it had been retained, 
would have done something to prevent the almost 
universal misconception that the Bible is one 
book, and not a collection of books, the various 
offspring of 1200 years of literary activity — the 
collected fragments and remnants of a great 
national literature. What we have in the Bible 
is not one book, but a library brought together 
within the same covers. Even the plural form 
of the name was never used until the fifth century. 
Before that they were called the scriptures, 
or the writings. 

Leaving the title and opening the book, what 
do we find ? If it be a Catholic copy or one 
of the older Protestant copies, we shall find 
three divisions : the Old Testament, the , 
Apocrypha, and the New Testament. We will, 
however, leave out of consideration the Apocrypha, 
although it is received by CathoHcs as of equal 
authority with the rest. 

The two divisions that are left consist of 



FRAGMENTS OF A NATIONAL LITERATURE 3 1 

histories, legal enactments, poetry, prophecy, 
letters, myths, hymns, sermons, pamphlets, fly 
sheets, stories, parables, proverbs, treatises, and 
almost every kind of hterary effort. 

The Old Testament has in it thirty-nine separate 
books, and the New Testament twenty-seven, 
making a library of sixty-six little volumes in 
all. So far as the thirty-nine books of the Old 
Testament are concerned, they are, as I have 
said, the collected fragments and remnants of 
a great national literature. The lost books of 
the Bible would be an inestimable treasure if 
they could be found. It seems that there are 
no less than sixteen books missing from the Old 
Testament which clearly ought to be there ; at 
least, which are referred to and quoted in the 
Bible as if they were genuine Old Testament Books. 
The Book of Jasher, the Book of Nathan and Gad, 
the Book of the Wars of the Lord, the Book of 
Ahijah and Iddo, Solomon's Parables and Treatise 
on Natural History, the Words of the Seers, 
the Prophecy of Enoch, and others are all 
mentioned ; and in some places long quotations 
are given from them, such as David's lament over 
Saul and Jonathan. This is the first point that 
comes out in the most superficial examination of 
the Bible ; that it contains the remnants of two 
great hteratures — that of the Jewish nation, and 
that of the early Christian Church. 



32 THE AUTHORIZED VERSION 

Then as to its authors. Many of the books are 
anonymous, and others, such as the Pentateuch, 
are attributed to people whom we know could 
never have written them, because they contain 
allusions to events which happened after they 
were dead. Who wrote the Book of Judges and 
of Joshua, the so-called Five Books of Moses, 
the Books of Samuel, the Book of Job, we shall 
never be able to settle ; about some of them we 
cannot even make a guess. As for the others 
they represent all classes of society from King 
David to the shepherd Amos ; there are women, 
poets, soldiers, musicians, fishermen, statesmen, 
physicians, men of all callings and all conditions, 
among the writers and contributors to this 
wonderful collection. 

As to its date, the most erroneous opinions 
prevail. The notion formerly held was that the 
first five books of the Old Testament were written 
by Moses nearly 1500 years before Christ. But 
with the growth of modern scholarship this idea has 
been steadily losing ground. It is now seen that 
very large portions of those books could not have 
been written or arranged until long after Moses' 
death, probably not until he had been dead 
four hundred years. Moses did not write the 
account of his own death, Moses did not give in 
the Pentateuch the names of places which had no 
existence when he lived ; or mention names of 



MOSES AND THE PENTATEUCH 33 

weights and measures then unknown, or allude 
to events as past and well known which only 
happened after his death, or show a technical 
acquaintance with the topography of a land 
he was never allowed to enter. Moses probably 
wrote very little, only the Ten Commandraents, 
the Song of Miriam, and one or two other passages. 
In some form or other, * the Law,' as this part 
of the Bible was called, was probably first put 
together in Samuel's time — perhaps by Samuel ; 
but in the form in which we have it, not until 
about four hundred and fifty B.C., in the reign 
of Nehemiah. The Genesis myth of the creation 
of the world, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob, had long been transmitted in oral form, 
and no doubt date back much before Moses. 
They may, indeed, have existed in a written 
form as family records, but were certainly not 
brought together in the way we have them until 
a late period in Jewish history. 

Our English Bible is, as you know, a translation 
from certain Hebrew and Greek MSS. But this 
which we call the Authorized Version to-day 
was not the first of such translations. It is the 
last but one of the series beginning with the 
work of Tyndale, Coverdale, and their compeers, 
followed by the Geneva, the Bishops', the Douay 
Bible and others, until at last under the patronage 
of King James I in 1611, 294 years ago, the 



34 THE AUTHORIZED VERSION 

version was published with which we are all so 
familiar. 

Now I must call your attention to two or three 
particulars of our English Bible. You will find as 
you open it that it is divided not only into books, 
but these books are cut up into chapters and 
verses. Are these chapters and verses any part 
of the original ? Not at all. We need to bear 
this in mind because sometimes it is a matter 
of great practical importance. There are no 
chapters and verses in the Hebrew and Greek, 
but each book consists of one solid mass of words, 
without divisions of any sort, without capitals 
or marks of punctuation. Not until 1551 was 
the Bible printed with its present divisions of 
chapter and verse, by Henry Stephens, the great 
printer-scholar of his time. The divisions, though 
often convenient, yet often obscure the sense 
and break the connexion ; and the verse arrange- 
ment especially has been a fruitful source of 
textual polemics, resulting in bad blood and bad 
theology. The verse divisions are often so purely 
arbitrary that in many instances it would have 
been just as accurate if the text had been divided 
into sections of half an inch in length without 
any regard to their meaning. 

Another thing peculiar to our English Bible is 
the chapter headings and running titles, indicating, 
according to King James's translators, the mean- 



TRANSLATION NOT INFALLIBLE 35 

ing of the authors. With the exception of the 
Psalms they all date from 161 1. They are no 
part of the Bible. Many of them are not only 
fanciful but grossly incorrect. They are really 
a process of interpreting Scripture according to 
the theology which was orthodox in 1611. It 
is these headings which have caused that noble 
eastern love-poem, the Song of Songs, to be so 
misunderstood and ridiculed, turning a beautiful 
human lesson into an allegory of Christ and his 
Church. Many of the running titles in the 
Pentateuch and Prophets are equally absurd. 

Let us remember, then, as we handle the Bible 
that the original writers are not responsible 
for these headings any more than they are 
responsible for the divisions into chapters and 
verses. 

One other thing about our English Bible must 
be borne in mind. Let us grant for a moment 
that the original Hebrew and Greek MSS. are 
the infallible word of God. Nevertheless, as we 
open our English Bible, we cannot feel that we 
have in our hands an infallible translation of this 
infallible work. No one claims that the trans- 
lators were infallible. We have only their 
judgment as to what the original writers mxcant, 
put into the best English they knew. But now we 
know that many portions of the existing Hebrew 
and Greek MSS. were copied from other sources. 



36 THE AUTHORIZED VERSION 

Were those copyists infallibly protected from error ? 
The records, had they been originally infallible, 
would still have needed special and continuous 
miracle (which no one claims) to protect them 
through generations of oral tradition, cuneiform, 
and hieroglyphic picture-writing, many languages, 
many scribes, many printers. No two transla- 
tions are exactly alike. Even in the Revised 
Version, made by the best scholarship in the 
world, the American and English members differed 
very seriously as to the meaning of certain words 
and phrases. These differences are so important 
that an appendix has been added containing 
them. Supposing even that 3500 years ago God 
Almighty spoke a few sentences face to face 
with Moses, there is no conceivable machinery 
or combination of circumstances which could 
ensure the perfectly accurate transmission of 
those words to us. We have received them 
through records which, while generally trust- 
worthy, cannot be trusted in many of their minute 
details, and through men who were as liable to 
err as we are. We may well believe that nothing 
essential has been lost ; but we cannot believe 
that everything preserved has been preserved 
without mistake. Yet in our English Bible as 
it is, what a boon we have ! Even the obscurer 
parts of the Pentateuch are full of moral and 
spiritual teaching of eternal value. In spite of 



THE VALUE OF THE BIBLE 37 

their unintelligent and often superstitious interpre- 
tation, how mightily have the Scriptures worked 
for life and godliness ! Many who use the Bible 
in a very faulty way have yet found it to be the 
Bread of Life unto their souls. It is like the air 
we breathe : we may pollute it but we cannot do 
without it. It is like wheaten flour : we may 
cook it badly, and make an indigestible mess of 
it instead of palatable bread ; but even as heavy 
and unpalatable dough it sustains human life. 
EngHshmen have long misunderstood and mis- 
applied many parts of the Bible ; yet how much of 
what is best in the EngHsh character, how much 
of its love of honesty and plain dealing, its 
reverence for domestic purity, its passion for 
freedom, may be traced to the famiharity of om* 
fathers with the letter of the Bible ! And if the 
Bible has exercised so great an influence over men 
who so often used it wrongly, how much greater 
wiU be its influence when it is everywhere used 
with intelligence, by men who are alive to the 
eternal difference between the letter and the 
spirit ! 



Ill 

THE TEXT AND THE CANON 

In connexion with these lectures I have 
received an interesting letter in which the writer 
says : ^ If we admit that any fart of the Bible is 
mistaken, how can we have confidence with regard 
to the rest ? Either it is all inspired or every man 
is free to pick and choose as he pleases' 

Now this is not at all an uncornmon frame 
of mind. Often in the course of controversy 
the cry is raised, ' The whole Bible or nothing.' 
In the ' Life of Lord Shaftesbury/ we are told that 
this great-hearted but narrow-minded man was 
much shocked by the assertion that the Books 
of Chronicles and the Gospel of St. Luke were 
not on the same level of inspiration. He replied : 
' There is no security whatever except in standing 
upon the faith of our fathers, and saying that the 
blessed old book is God's word written from the 
very first syllable to the very last, and from the last 
book to the first.' But is it true that we are shut 



THE ' ALL OR NOTHING ' THEORY 39 

Up to the alternative, the whole Bible or nothing ? 
If we speak of a gold mine we do not mean to 
say that nothing but gold is found there : what 
we mean is that while quartz, and sand, and mud, 
and rubble are there, gold is its valuable and 
distinctive product. What would you think of a 
miner who should say : ' How am I to tell the 
difference between the gold and the rubbish ? ' 
You would say : ' You must use your eyes, your 
common sense, and the tests which a knowledge 
of mining supply.' The Bible is a gold mine ; 
but all is not gold found there, and we have to 
discriminate. We are told that to destroy a 
verse or a letter of the Bible is to destroy the 
whole ; either all is true or nothing can be rehed 
upon. But you never think of applying the 
* all or nothing theor^^ ' to any other book. If I 
open the Globe edition of Shakespeare, I find 
included among his plays, ' Timon of Athens,' 
which, when I carefully examine, I conclude 
was written by Shakespeare only in part. But 
do I therefore invalidate Shakespeare's claim 
to be the author of ' Hamlet ' ? Or do I ask the 
foolish question, how am I to know that anything 
is by Shakespeare if I admit that he did not write 
every word of that which passes under his name ? 
The answer is obvious. You must discriminate : 
you must bring to bear the tests furnished by 
wide reading, by literary criticism, by familiarity 



40 THE TEXT AND THE CANON 

with Shakespeare and his comrades, and, above 
all, by good sense. 

You would think the man a fool who threw 
away his Shakespeare because it turned out that 
* Timon of Athens ' was not from Shakespeare's 
pen at all ; and what shall we say of men who 
declare that the Bible is worthless for a similar 
reason ? When a man asks how he may know 
whether this portion of the Bible is inspired or 
not, I answer. Use your common sense ; what 
is the impression the passage makes on you ? 
Do you feel it to be an utterance of quickening, 
hallowing power ? How does it compare with 
other utterances about whose inspiration you 
have no doubt ? And if you are warned that in 
all this you are just trusting to the light of reason, 
I answer. What else is a man to trust ? Unless 
he brings his reason to bear upon religious 
problems — reason enHghtened by conscience, affec- 
tion, experience, and knowledge, what else can 
he bring to bear ? But his reason may deceive 
him. Yes, and so may our eyes deceive us, when 
they tell us that the sun goes round the earth. 
Often we have to correct the testimony of our 
eyes by knowledge obtained in other ways. Yet, 
on the whole, our eyes are the guides God intended 
us to follow, and we do not pluck them out because 
once and again they make mistakes. So, on the 
whole, reason is the guide God intends us to follow 



NO ORIGINAL MS. 4I 

in religion, and we do not discard its testimony 
because sometimes it is mistaken. If reason 
ever leads us astray it is simply because we have 
not exercised it diligently enough. 

This much, then, to dispose of an objection 
which has troubled some who are attending 
these lectures. 

To-night our subject is the Text and the Canon. 
By the text we mean the original Hebrew and 
Greek MSS. from which our translation is 
made. 

Now it may surprise some of you to know 
that there is no one original Hebrew or Greek 
MS. containing the books of our Bible. There is 
no one authorized copy of the Old Testament 
in Hebrew, no one authorized copy of the New 
Testament in Greek. There are great numbers of 
MSS., some older than the others ; but no two 
of them exactly alike, so that scholars, before 
they translate, have to construct a text — that 
is, have to compare and collate, and out of 
various MSS., and various readings, compile a 
Greek Testament, from which they make the 
translation. 

Let us take the New Testament. We have in 
the world a collection — not in any one place, 
but in many places — of nearly 1700 Greek MSS. 
of the New Testament. Sometimes a MS. is 
complete, containing all the books, sometimes 



. 42 THE TEXT AND THE CANON 

containing certain books not now admitted, 
sometimes omitting books which we receive. 

Are all these MSS. aUke ? Does there seem 
to h,ave been any supernatural supervision 
exercised in making these copies to keep out 
errors or mistakes ? You can judge for your- 
selves when I tell you that in these 1700 MSS. 
there are nearly 150,000 various readings. It 
is only just to say, of course, that the larger 
part of these variations are minute, not touching 
matters of great importance ; sometimes only 
the difference in the spelUng of a word ; some- 
times a difference in the name of a place ; but 
some of them are important enough to extend 
to whole paragraphs and parts of chapters. 

These variations came about in the most 
natural way. Through the errors of copyists ; 
through the desire of copyists to make something 
clear which they thought they could do by 
changing one word for another ; through differ- 
ences of opinion as to the evidence for this and 
that story or utterance ; through the incorporation 
into the text of some comment made by a 
learned father ; and alas ! through the wilful 
changing or insertion of words to bolster up a par- 
ticular theological doctrine, these variations were 
produced. Most of them are the simple errors 
of copyists, mere slips of eye, ear, memory, or 
judgment. If you have ever had a long letter 



THE THREE EARLIEST MSS. 43 

copied by the hands of a clerk, or if you have 
ever attempted to do any copying yourself, you 
know how easy it is to leave out or mis-spell a 
word, or to substitute a wrong one, or to make 
any one of a dozen common errors. If, however, 
you remember that these Greek MSS. were not 
divided into chapters and verses, but were written 
sohd, without capitals, without punctuation marks, 
without any division even into paragraphs, you 
will see how easy it was for errors of one kind or 
another to creep in. 

But, you say, surely the earliest MSS. of all 
would be free from most of these errors, and if 
we translate from them we shall be all right. 
But the earliest MSS. of all are copies of copies, of 
copies, of copies ! Do you know we have no MS. 
of the New Testament earlier than the fourth 
century ? There are three MSS. earliest in date 
which are reckoned as the greatest authorities 
on the Text of the New Testament. The oldest 
in existence is the Sinaitic ; the next is the 
Vatican ; and the third is the Alexandrian. 
The Sinaitic is at St. Petersburg ; the Vatican 
is at Rome ; and the Alexandrian in the British 
Museum. 

The Sinaitic and the Vatican belong to the 
fourth, and the Alexandrian to the fifth century. 
That is to say, we have no MS. that takes us back 
nearer to Jesus than 300 years after his death. 



44 THE TEXT AND THE CANON 

But we know from other sources that if earUer 
MSS. could be recovered they would be as full 
of differences as those we possess. The works 
of the Fathers of the second and third centuries 
contain quotations from the New Testament, many 
of which do not at all agree with each other ; 
and these same Fathers are constantly charging 
their opponents with wilfully corrupting the text 
of Scripture for their own party purposes. The 
greatest name of those days is that of Origen, 
and, writing on this subject, he says : ' As the 
case stands, it is obvious that the difference between 
the copies is considerable, partly from the carelessness 
of individual scribes, partly from the wicked daring 
of some in correcting what is written, partly from 
those who add or remove what seems good to them 
in the process of correction.'' 

He himself expressly notices thirteen different 
readings in the four Gospels. If even the first 
autograph MSS. from the writers' hands were 
before us, we should not feel confident that we 
had received in every case the exact words of 
Jesus. For the Evangelists themselves tell us 
how often the disciples misunderstood their 
Master. When he called himself ' The Bread 
of Life,'' and said, ' He that eateth me shall live 
by me^ they understood the words literally 
and could make no sense of them. How can we 
be sure of the verbal accuracy of reporters who 



DIFFERENCES IN MSS. 45 

are so liable to be stuck fast by the letter ? I 
have no doubt that, on the whole, we have in the 
Gospels an account which gives us substantially 
the sayings and the teaching of Jesus ; but we 
have no such infallibly accurate account as justifies 
us in building a tremendous doctrine — such, for 
instance, as that of everlasting punishment — on 
the literal rendering of a couple of texts. Before a 
doctrine so awful is offered me for belief, I should 
like to be assured that the meagre texts on which 
it is based do really report the very words of 
Jesus, and that it has no other authority than 
the blunder of a copyist. Why, these three great 
MSS. preserved to us, differ from each other on 
many minor and some important points. The 
Alexandrian MS. contains the Epistle of Clement 
to the Corinthians, and omits the first twenty-four 
chapters of St. Matthew. The Vatican MS. 
does not contain the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, 
and Philemon — nor the Apocalypse. The Sinaitic 
MS., procured by the great scholar Tischendorf 
from an old monastery on Mount Sinai in the 
year 1859, contains the Epistle to Barnabas 
and the Shepherd of Hermas — two books now 
rejected. When these MSS. contain the same 
books they differ as to many words and phrases 
in them, and we are thrown back on probability, 
on common sense, and on human scholarship as 
to which is the most likely reading. 



46 THE TEXT AND THE CANON 

The difficulties of the text are still greater in 
Hebrew. The number of ancient Hebrew MSS. 
is very few, nor do any of them date from before 
Christ. You must remember that Hebrew had 
been a dead language nearly 400 years B.C. The 
language of the Jews in Palestine was Aramaic, 
and of the Jews who lived in the towns of the 
Mediterranean, Greek. For the benefit of the 
Jews living in Palestine, translations of the Old 
Testament had been made into Aramaic, and 
these were called Targums ; for the Jews living 
in the Levant, a translation had been made into 
Greek. There is no sign that either Jesus or any 
of his disciples had any knowledge of Hebrew. 
The quotations from the Old Testament in the 
New are never from the Hebrew, they are mostly, 
from the Greek translation called the Septuagint. 
The Septuagint was a version made at Alexandria 
for the Jews who had settled in the Levant. 
There is a pretty story of its formation. It 
relates that one of the Ptolemies, wishing to adorn 
his Alexandrian library with the writings of all 
nations, requested from the Jews of Jerusalem a 
Greek version of their Scriptures ; that the Jews, 
of Jerusalem sent seventy eldeis to Alexandria, 
well skilled both in Hebrew and Greek ; that 
the king separated them from each other, so 
that each lived in his own cell, nor had any 
communication with another, and bade them all 



VARIOUS READINGS 47 

translate the several books of the Old Testament ; 
that when they came together before Ptolemy, 
at the end of their labours, God was glorified, 
for all the seventy versions made apart agreed 
exactly from beginning to end in every word and 
phrase. Justin Martyr, in relating the story, 
adds that he was taken to see the seventy cells 
in which the translators worked ! In reality there 
can be no doubt that the version was gradually 
made by several authors and at different times. 
It seems to have been finally completed about 
200 B.C. It was this version that was quoted by 
the Apostles ; which was everywhere appealed 
to in the early Christian Church ; and which the 
Ethiopian eunuch was reading when Philip 
met him. 

It included what the Hebrew Bible did not 
include — the Apocrypha ; and this is how the 
Apocrypha came to pass into use in the Christian 
Church. The Apocrypha forms no part of the 
Hebrew Bible. 

Now, aU that I have said about the errors of 
copyists and the various readings of different 
MSS. with regard to the New Testament, appHes 
to the Old, with this further element bearing 
upon the question of literal verbal accuracy. 
You are aware, perhaps, that the Hebrew language, 
as originally written, was made up entirely of 
consonants : that is, Hebrew words as written 



48 THE TEXT AND THE CANON 

had no vowels at all. The vowel sounds which 
made the consonants pronounceable were handed 
down orally. It was not until 600 years after 
Christ that the accent marks were added, which 
point out to the student where the vowels should 
come in, and what they should be. Thus a 
word of three consonants might mean this or 
that according to the vowel sounds added ; and 
these vowel sounds must be added according to 
the judgment of the reader as to the meaning. 
Suppose Enghsh were printed without vowels, 
and you should find a word of the three 
consonants, ' p.p.r.' It might mean paper, or 
piper, or pepper — you would gather the meaning 
from the context. Or suppose the word consisted 
of two consonants, ' p.n.' It might be pen, or 
pun, or pan, or pain, according to the vowel 
sound added. Do you not see how this must have 
added to the difhculty of translation and have 
been an additional source of error ? That I 
may not convey a false impression, let me quote 
an actual instance given by Professor Robertson 
Smith. In one passage Jacob is represented as 
uttering his dying woids to bis sons while leaning, 
upon his hed. Another passage referring to the 
same scene, tells us that he did so leaning on his 
staff. This is easy of explanation when we knew 
that the two words bed and staff are in Hebrew 
one word, and may be made to mean either bed 



THE CANON OR RULE 49 

or staff, according to the vowel sound added. 
What a wide field for misconception and error 
there is open here !^ 

Now let me say a few words about the Canon. 
Canon means a rule — it first referred to a carpenter's 
rule or measure, and from that came to be applied 
to any standard by which things were judged. 
Thus the canons of art are the rules of art. A 
canon in music is a piece of music which follows 
a very strict rule, the melody being the model 
on which all the other parts are formed. Even 
the Canon of a Cathedral gets his title in the same 
way ; he is one belonging to an order and under 
a certain definite rule of discipline. So the 
Canonical books of the Bible — the Canon — are 
the books that have a right to be there, because 
they answer and come up to a certain rule 
or standard of judgment. They have been 
measured and found to be inspired and authentic. 

But the curious thing is that nobody knows 
what this rule is or who framed it. Are all the 
books included in the Bible that ought to be there ? 
Well, nobody knows. The Canon was not settled 
all at one time : like Topsy, it ' growed.' Look 
at the Old Testament. There was no such book 
at all as the Old Testament until 450 B.C. In 

1 A striking instance is noted by Dr. G. Adam Smith in his 
commentary on Isaiah xxix. — the obscure oracle of Oriel. 'A riel 
may mean either the Lion of God or the Hearth of God.' p. 211. 



50 THE TEXT AND THE CANON 

its present form it was the work of Ezra and his 
scribes. But right up to the destruction of 
Jerusalem it was a matter of dispute whether 
Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, 
Ecclesiasticus, the Maccabees, and other books of 
the Apocrypha, should or should not be included ; 
and the dispute was only stopped by the destruc- 
tion of the Temple, and the dispersion of the Jews, 
which put an end to the growth of the Old 
Testament. 

Thus, without any superhuman guidance, the 
Canon of the Old Testament came to be settled. 
And in my judgment some of the books which 
were left out were more worthy of a place than 
some which were left in. Or take the New 
Testament. It is possible, in this case, to follow 
the process of formation more closely than in 
the case of the Old Testament. 

From the way in which the New Testament is 
commonly regarded, one would suppose that it 
came down from heaven, as the Koran of the 
Moslem fable did, in a single night : that it was 
written either by the Almighty hand or at his 
immediate dictation. But what we find is, that 
for ages the New Testament writings were not 
regarded as Scripture at all. A Christian of the 
second century would have been as much shocked 
as a Jew at putting them on a level with the 
Old Testament. The Bible of the Christian 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 5 1 

Church — for at least 200 years after Christ — was 
the Old Testament, and the Old Testament 
only. Oral tradition was esteemed of greater 
value than the written Epistles and Gospels. 
By the close of the second century, however, 
a change appears. Certain New Testament books 
have come into general favour, and are beginning 
to be reverenced and quoted and set apart as 
a new collection of inspired writings. As time 
went on they grew more and more into use by 
the Churches, and came to be read side by side 
with the Old Testament. Nobody settled this. 
It settled itself. Accident, taste, practical needs, 
good sense, settled it. Yet for centuries the 
various Churches continued to use side by side 
with the writings which make up our New Testa- 
ment, various books which we call spurious. 
It is curious to note that hardly one of the great 
Fathers of the Church draws the line of canonicity 
where we draw it. In almost every case they 
include some books that we reject, or reject 
some that we include. Irenaeus, one of the earliest 
and most authentic, rejects five books now in 
the New Testament — Hebrews, Jude, James, 
II Peter, and III John, while he includes the 
Shepherd of Hermas. The celebrated TertuUian 
rejects all the books of the New Testament, 
except the four Gospels, Acts, thirteen Epistles 
of Paul, the Apocalypse, and I John. That is, 



52 THE TEXT AND THE CANON 

he rejects Hebrews, Jude, I and II Peter, II and 
III John, and James. 

Meanwhile, every Church did as it pleased-, 
and the greatest confusion prevailed until the 
year a.d. 332, when the Emperor Constantine 
entrusted Eusebius with authority to make a 
complete collection of the sacred writings for 
the use of the Catholic Church. The list contained 
all the present books except the Revelation of 
St. John. And so it went on, and notwithstanding 
decisions of the Councils, books continued to be 
read in the Churches which were not on the list, 
and others on the list were regarded with suspicion. 
Jerome and Augustine were much divided in 
opinion. The Roman Catholic Church has never 
heartily accepted the Hebrews. Even Protestants 
were far from unanimity in regard to the right 
of certain books to be in the Bible. They claimed 
for themselves freedom of judgment to say what 
is Scripture. ' The Fourth Book of Esdras,' 
said Luther, ' I toss into the Elbe.' The Epistle 
of James he caUed ' An Epistle of straw.' 
Erasmus maintained that the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, II Peter, II and III John, and the 
Apocalypse were not written by Apostles ; but 
he says he does not esteem them of less value 
on that account, for if they contain good teaching 
it does not matter by whom they were written. 
Calvin, in like manner, thought that Hebrews 



COU^XIL OF TRENT 53 

and II Peter were not written by Apostles. He 
is doubtful about James and Jude, but he approves 
of them because, he says, ' they contain useful 
reading ' — a very sensible and sufficient reason. 

In 1545 the Papal Church called the Council 
of Trent to deal with the heresies of the Reforma- 
tion. At this Council, and for the first time 
in the history of the Christian Church, the question 
of the contents of the Bible w^as made an absolute 
article of faith and confirmed by an anathema. 
The books of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, 
and the New Testament, as we have kno^^m it, were 
declared to be aU on the same level, and to have 
doubts about any of them was to bring down a 
curse upon the soul. In this Council there was 
not one great scholar, nor one German divine. 
So that while it has been a great feature of 
Protestantism to refer to the authority of the 
Bible instead of the Pope, it was the Papal Church 
that set up a hard and fast hne about the books 
of the Bible and made it heresy to question them. 

Such is the story of New Testament canonicity. 
Such were the accidents and vicissitudes to which 
the New Testament writings were subjected 
before they arrived at the position of supernatural 
and infallible authority. Nowhere along the 
line have we a particle of e\ndence of any super- 
natural guidance or illumination which enabled 
those who judged these books and others to decide 



54 THE TEXT AND THE CANON 

which were and which were not of miraculous 
origin. The most varied motives contributed to 
the final arrangement — some prudential, some 
superstitious, but scarcely any based on sound 
scholarship. 

Among the strangers who are attending these 
lectures, some may be startled and shocked 
when they hear it declared that the Bible is not 
infallible — that it is entirely a human book — 
that it has grown, as other things have grown, in 
a natural way, and has not been preserved from 
error any more than Shakespeare's Plays or 
Plato's Dialogues. But let me tell you that all 
this does not take away one jot from the beauty 
and worth of the Bible as a whole. Like you, 
I once believed in an infallible book ; but I can 
honestly say that the Bible means far more to 
me now that the scales have dropped from my 
eyes and I see it as a human production than 
when I believed in its Divine origin. It is easy 
for the scholarship of to-day to see that the men 
who are responsible for our Bible being what it 
is now made many and grave mistakes. Never- 
theless, could we understand all the circumstances, 
we should very probably be surprised, and 
certainly we should see that we had reason to 
be grateful, that these mistakes were not more 
and graver still. That the books which have 
been declared Canonical and handed down as 



SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 55 

such to US are so unique, shows that a great 
and wonderful law Uke that which scientific 
men call ' natural selection,' or ' the survival of 
the fittest,' has been at work in the Bible, and 
has preser\^ed to us the things fullest of Divine 
wisdom and teaching. Twelve hundred years 
of religious Evolution, and of the development 
of the moral and spiritual powers of a speciailly 
rehgious race, have given us our Bible. 

It contains the prayers, the hymns, the story 
of the moral progress, the failures, the aspirations, 
the autobiography of human nature on its religious 
side, from its infancy to its perfection. 

Out from the heart of Nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old ; 
The word unto the prophets spoken, 
Was A\Tit on tables yet unbroken ; 
Still floats upon the morning wind, 
Still whispers to the willing mind ; 
One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world has never lost ! 



IV 

THE REVISED VERSION 

It is a matter of thankfulness that we have at 
last a Revised Version of the Bible in our hands, 
a Bible which is free from the adulterations and 
obscurities that have so long marred its beauty 
and its meaning. Like most great undertakings, 
it had been for a long time ' in the air ' before 
it was actually taken in hand. Although divines 
and scholars and the educated laity were perfectly 
aware that the Authorized Version contained 
many errors, both of text and translation, that 
phrases had been tampered with in order to back 
up certain doctrines, that passages had been 
inserted which formed no part of the original, 
and that, instead of sound scholarship, King 
James's translators often displayed a theological 
bias ; yet the shrinking from change was so great, 
and the fear of consequences so cowardly, that 
the matter was delayed from time to time, till 
for very shame it could be put off no longer. 



DIFFICULTIES OF REVISION 57 

Of course there were great difficulties in the way. 
There was the veneration and love which had 
gathered for so many years around the Old 
Version, and which regarded any attempt at 
revision with as much horror as the dissection 
of the body of some dear friend. There was the 
latent fear that in the event of a thorough and 
honest revision, men would have to give up 
some of their old notions and doctrines which 
had been based upon interpolations and bad 
translations. This dread sometimes took a 
ludicrous shape. I remember lecturing, now 
thirty-five years ago, on the need of revision, 
doing what little I could in my own circle to 
create a right public opinion on the subject, 
when a good man got up, and in a voice trembling 
with emotion, deprecated laying any hands on 
the Sacred Ark. He said, ' I owe my conversion 
to a certain text in one of St. Paul's Epistles. 
Now, suppose in a revised version that text 
should be omitted on the ground that it is an 
interpolation — where should I be ? ' Where 
indeed ? There was, of course, no arguing with 
an ignorance, a density, and a fear like that. 
Then there was the dread that the New Version 
might substitute for the simple, graceful, and 
idiomatic diction we so much loved, a strange, 
modern, learned, inkhom diction. There was 
really some ground for this apprehension, because 



58 THE REVISED VERSION 

in previous attempts at revision by private hands 
such frightful sins against good taste had been 
committed, as to make revision a byword. In 
1768, a divine named Haywood offered the 
world a new translation of the New Testament, 
' with freedom, spirit, and elegance,' as he phrased 
it. Heie are two specimens of his improvements. 
For ' the child is not dead ' in the old version, 
he gave ' the young lady is not dead ' ; and the 
opening of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, ' a 
certain man had two sons,^ he changed into ' a 
gentleman of splendid family and opulent fortune 
had two sons.'' 

Benjamin Franklin tried his hand at the Book 
of Job. You all recollect the famous verse in 
our translation : ' Then Satan answered the Lord 
and said, Doth Job fear God for nought ? ' Franklin 
makes this, ' Does your Majesty imagine that Job's 
good conduct is the effect of mere personal attachment 
and affection ? ' 

Bishop Louth sins also in the attempt to 
substitute fine English for the simple, idiomatic 
English of the Authorized Version. Thus, in 
his translation of the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, - 
he changes the phrase, ' Speak ye comfortably 
to Jerusalem ' into ' Speak ye animating words 
to Jerusalem.'' 

I am sorry to confess that one of my predecessors 
in the pulpit of the Old Meeting fell into the 



PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS 59 

same pit. In a Book of Prayers, prepared for 
this congregation, a revised Burial Service is 
included, with a new translation of the famous 
chapter in Corinthians which we read on those 
solemn occasions. You wiU remember the words, 
' But some man will say, With what body do they 
come ? ' And you will also remember the plain 
way in which St. Paul indicates his opinion of 
the inteUigence of such an inquirer — ' TAow 
fool, that which thou sow est,'' etc. But thou fool 
was much too vulgar for our ancestors in this 
Church, and so they translated — ' Thou incon- 
siderate man.' No wonder men dreaded the 
possibility of a revision giving them a Bible 
in fine English. Then it was said that the time 
was not ripe, that scholars were not yet agreed 
as to the authority of certain readings, that the 
version in use had answered all practical purposes 
for so many years that we need be in no hurry 
to amend it. 

Happily these reasons could not hold their 
own against an enlightened public opinion. It 
was in June, 1870, that the Revisers began 
their labours. 

They were divided into two companies — one 
for the Old Testament, and one for the New 
Testament. They were composed of the most 
eminent scholars England could furnish, and 
wisely chosen irrespective of creed or Church 



6o THE REVISED VERSION 

No one can forget the celebrated communion 
service in Westminster Abbey, when, at the 
invitation of that loving, large, and catho]ic 
spirit, Dean Stanley, the Revisers met to implore 
the Divine blessing on their labours, and 
Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, 
and Unitarian knelt together at the same altar, 
and received in common the touching memorials 
of the Christian faith. The work begun with 
such high hopes and in such a liberal spirit was 
carried through with admirable energy, patience, 
temper, and skill. Few people have any concep- 
tion of the amount of time and labour given, 
without one penny of reward, by the Revisers. 
The Old Testament Company were fifteen years 
at work. They sat for 792 days and every day 
for six hours. The New Testament company 
sat for nearly 500 days, and in addition there was 
an immense mass of correspondence with the 
American company which sat at the same time. 
And the result is that we have at last something 
like the true Bible in our hands. Not that all 
obscure parts have yet been made clear, nor 
that it is settled in every case which is the true 
reading. The Revised Version contains a mass 
of marginal notes, which appear as alternative 
readings, and in as many as 1200 instances the 
American company differ from their English 
brethren, their differences having been recorded 



RELIGION NOT DEPENDENT ON THE BIBLE 6l 

in appendixes. But in the present state of 
knowledge and scholarship we have a version 
perhaps as near perfection as we could hope 
to attain. 

This is a result and a success in which the 
adherents of a liberal Christianity especially 
rejoice. Not that in the nature of things we are 
likely to feel quite so deep an interest in getting 
the best rendering of the best text as our 
Evangehcal and orthodox friends ought to feel. 
For I suppose most of us believe that the true 
credentials of religion lie deeper than Authorized 
Version, or Revised Version, or Greek MSS., or 
Hebrew vowel points : that they are written, not 
with pen and ink, nor even engraved on tables 
of stone, but rather stamped indelibly on the 
fleshly tablets of the human heart. 

Our religion would survive, I imagine, not only 
the corruption of texts, but the very destruction 
of the Bible itself, and re-create itself with every 
new-born soul, for ' of such is the kingdom of 
heaven.'' This is not to say we do not feel the 
immense importance and preciousness of the 
Bible, both as a record of the religious history of 
man and a fountain of living inspiration. Only 
with us it is not the Bible alone that is our religion ; 
for us the Bible is not the only word that pro- 
ceedeth out of the mouth of God. Yet it is so 
great and valuable a word that we earnestly desire 



62 THE REVISED VERSION 

to have it in an accurate form. We do not want 
the theology of the tenth, or the seventeenth, or 
the nineteenth centuries obtruded upon us as 
we read the sweet, passionate lyrics of the Book 
of Psalms, or when we listen to the heart-moving 
words of Jesus. That the Bible should speak 
for itself has been our desire all along, and so 
we especially rejoice that all which made the 
Bible speak with another voice than its own 
has been done away. 

For instance, what an enormous amount of 
mischief has been done by the headings of the 
chapters and the running titles at the top of the 
pages of the Authorized Version, professing to 
tell us what they are about. These headings and 
titles are really little doctrinal sermons, foisting 
a particular theology into the Bible. We all 
know Carlyle's scorn of the ' Intelligent Editor ' 
and the ' Intelligent Commentator,' who does 
so much tc darken counsel with words ; and some 
of you will remember the story of the poor woman 
to whom a tract was given containing the parable 
of the Prodigal Son with explanations, and who, 
on being questioned, said ' she understood the 
parable quite easily, and hoped some day to 
understand the explanation.' So the Bible tells 
its own talp, as a rule, quite clearly ; yet finger- 
posts were put up by King James's translators, 
who wanted it to tell their tale. For instance, 



MISCHIEF OF CHAPTER HEADINGS 63 

what is called the ' Christology of the Old Testa- 
ment,' that is, finding in it numberless references 
to the unborn Christ, is largely due to the chapter 
headings, by which the divines of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries tried to make the Bible 
support the doctrine of Christ's pre-existence. 
If ordinary people had not been told that a certain 
account or description by the prophet of Cyrus 
or Hezekiah was really a description of Christ, 
it would never have entered into their heads 
to make the application. The celebrated chapter 
in Isaiah (ch. ix) where we have the words, ' For 
unto us a child is horn, unto us a son is given, and 
the government shall he upon his shoulder : and 
his name shall he called Wonderful, Counsellor, 
the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince 
of Peace,'' refers, as every careful reader may 
see, to Hezekiah. He is the wonderful child 
who shall restore peace and glory to Israel and 
reign in righteousness. But the chapter heading 
is ' Christ's birth and kingdom ' ; and the phrase, 
' the mighty God,' which Dr. Rowland Williams 
tells us should be ' the mighty Hero,' has been 
often quoted to prove the deity of Christ. If 
it proves deity at all, it proves the deity of 
Hezekiah. But it does no such thing. Now it 
is a great gain that in the Revised Version those 
chapter headings are done away and the Bible 
is allowed to speak for itself. 



64 THE REVISED VERSION 

The next thing that strikes the reader of the 
Revised Version is the abohtion of the purely 
arbitrary divisions of chapter and verse — divisions 
which often break the connexion and mar the 
sense and create many difficulties for the reader. 
In the Revised Version the text is arranged 
in paragraphs, the old numbers of the chapters 
and verses being given at the side for the sake 
of convenience in reference, and no one can fail 
to see that the sense of the Bible is much more 
connected and more comprehensible in this way 
than in the Authorized Version. 

A third general feature of the revision remains 
to be noticed — the printing of all the songs, 
psalms and poetry verse-wise, so as to show at 
once that we are dealing with poetry and not 
with prose. It is a great gain that the songs 
and national ballads interspersed through the 
historical books should be printed as songs, and 
we should know them to be what they are, 
quotations from ancient books of national poetry. 
Probably if that little extract from an old ballad- 
book given in Joshua x. had been originally 
printed as it is now, a good deal of troublesome 
speculation might have been spared about that 
most perplexing of all alleged miracles — the 
standing still of the sun. A phrase of poetry 
would never have been mistaken for a statement 
of fact. 



THE R.V. IX RELATION TO DOCTRINE 65 

Let me now refer you to a more important 
matter. How far does the Revised \'ersion 
affect questions of doctrine ? Now that we have 
a translation no longer biased by the theology 
of a particular school, how is the theolog}' of the 
various schools affected ? We are loudly assured 
that ever\i:hing remains as it was, that the 
orthodox theology, the theology of the creeds 
and the articles, the theology of popular 
Evangehcahsm and of popular Anghcanism, come 
out of the trial unscathed. ' Not one of these 
changes,' cries Bishop Wordsworth, ' affects one 
tittle or iota of the Christian faith/ ' It is 
certain,' echoes Canon Farrar, ' that no questions 
of faith or doctrine are altered by the New Testa- 
ment.' It is boldly asserted that, in spite of 
changes and omissions, nothing has occurred 
which need give a moment's alarm or even 
thought to the orthodox theologian. Nothing 
has happened ! On the contrary, I aver that very 
much has happened, and that this is so weU 
known, that it almost looks as if there were a 
conspiracy to keep the Re\ised Version out of 
use in our churches on this very score, ^^'hy, 
this has happened at the least — no one who 
comprehends the simple facts of the Revised 
Version can any longer hold that the Bible is 
infallible. In the New Testament alone, the total 
list of changes in text and translations, including 



66 THE REVISED VERSION 

changes of punctuation, number 36,191. In 
1600 cases the Greek text from which the 
Authorized Version was made has been changed ; 
in 18,000 cases words have been changed by a 
substituted rendering, and 4600 words have been 
added in translation. In all, seventeen per cent, 
of the words of the New Testament have been 
more or less altered. Of course out of this vast 
multitude of variations from the Authorized 
Version, only a very small proportion relate to 
what are commonly known as doctrinal passages. 
Nevertheless, the whole body of them bears heavily 
in virtue of its sheer numerical weight, on one 
point of doctrine — that of infallibility. It is 
impossible to regard as infallible a book in which 
the last revision has made 36,000 corrections, 
and which the American Revisers tell us ought 
to be corrected in 400 additional places. 

Notice at the outset two or three striking 
omissions from the commonly received text. 
Perhaps it was a matter of course that the cele- 
brated passage should be struck out — ' For there 
are three that hear record in heaven, the Father, the 
Word, and the Holy Ghost ; and these three are 
one,^^ The evidence against it is so overwhelming 
that for a long time it has been given up by the 
most ardent defenders of the Trinity. The 
revisers, who, with one exception, were all Trinit- 

1 I John V. 7. 



THE R.V. AND THE TRINITY 67 

arians, declare unanimously that this celebrated 
passage is no part of the Bible at all, but that it 
was inserted by some over-zealous disciple to 
bolster up a favourite doctrine, and like honest 
men they have ruthlessly cut it out. But what 
are we to say to those who assert that its omission 
makes no difference to orthodox doctrine ? It 
is the only text in the Bible which clearly states 
the doctrine of the Trinity : in no other place 
is it declared that ' these three are one ' ; it is 
the one unmistakable proof text from which 
thousands of sermons have been preached. The 
doctrine is only inferred from other texts ; in 
no other place is it explicitly taught. Does it 
make no difference to the scripture proof of a 
doctrine that the one and only text which plainly 
declared it is now pronoimced a forgery ? It is 
only childishness and folly to say everything is 
as it was, and revision has made no difference. 

Our Baptist friends have been accustomed to 
justify their refusal of baptism to children, and 
their doctnne of believers' baptism only, by the 
requirement of Philip and the confession of faith 
on the part of the eunuch of Candace before his 
baptism : and Philip said, ' If thou helievest with 
all thine heart thou may est {be baptized). And he 
answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is 
the son of God.'^ But now when the Baptist turns 

^ Ads viii. 17. 



68 THE REVISED VERSION 

to the New Testament he cannot find his favourite 
passage : it has no place in the best manuscripts, 
and the revisers have expunged it as an inter- 
polation. No other text so clearly upheld the 
Baptist position, and yet we are told that its 
excision leaves the question untouched ! 

Another noticeable omission is the explanation 
that the troubling of the water in the pool of 
Bethesda was due to the interposition of an angel. ^ 
The verse containing this picturesque incident 
is declared by the revisers to be no part of the 
original narrative. It is a striking instance of 
the growth of miraculous stories. What we see 
happened in this case, we are led to believe is 
what happened in many other cases. Everything 
strange and unaccountable in the ancient world 
was at once put down to supernatural agency. 
At Bethesda, as in many places well known to 
health-seekers, there was an intermittent spring 
having medicinal properties. The author of this 
Gospel was familiar with the virtues of the 
Bethesda spring, which he leaves us to suppose 
were due to natural causes. But a later copyist, 
possessed by the spirit which sees the miraculous 
in anything strange, must needs introduce by a 
little touch a supernatural element into the 
story. In this case the too busy hand has been 
detected in the very act of turning the simple 

1 John V. 4. 



IMPROVED READINGS 69 

into the miraculous. But in how many un- 
detected cases may the simple, natural incidents 
of the life of Jesus have thus received a super- 
natural explanation ? The revisers have shown 
us here a miracle in the making, and, to my mind, 
the sight is most instructive. 

Leaving unnoticed other important omissions, 
let me call your attention to some improved 
renderings of passages that have a bearing on 
Christian doctrine. 

Roman Catholics and High Churchmen have 
long been in the habit of quoting the words, 
* There shall he one fold and one shepherd,'''^ as 
showing that there ought to be one only visible 
church on earth. But this text is now^ rendered, 
not one fold, but one flock, a very different matter. 
One fold is one visible organization, one divinely 
appointed church ; but one flock may be gathered 
in many folds, and scattered in many churches. 

Our evangelical friends have for ages made 
much of the words, ' Without shedding of blood 
is no r emission. ^^ This has been one of the 
cardinal texts of their theology — proving the 
necessity of the actual blood-shedding of Jesus 
to the forgiveness of sins. But is not their 
favourite doctrine shaken to its foundations by 
the new rendering of the whole verse ? 'And 
according to the law, I may almost say, all things 

"^ John X. 16. ^Hebrews ix. 22. 



70 THE REVISED VERSION 

are cleansed, with hlood, and apart from shedding _ 
of hlood there is no remission.'' Now we see that 
these words were uttered not at all as expressing 
a Christian truth, but as a reproach to Judaism. 
Judaism taught that without shedding of blood 
there is no remission, but the writer's point is 
that Christianity teaches something far better. 

Or look at some of the well-known and often 
quoted proof texts of the doctrine of Christ's 
Deity. Here is the famous one, ' God manifest 
in the flesh ''^ The revisers tell us that the word 
God * rests on no sufficient ancient evidence,' 
but that the passage should read, ' He who 
was manifested in the flesh.'' Does this make 
no difference to the proof of the Godhead of 
Christ ? It is a great difference. One striking 
proof text is now admitted to be no proof at all, 
having no bearing on the question. 

One other instance will suffice. Here are the 
words : ' Hereby perceive we the love of God, because 
he laid down his life for us.^^ According to this 
rendering it was God who laid down his life 
for us and died on the cross, and in this sense 
it has been triumphantly used as proving that 
Christ is God. But how does this Revised Version 
run ? ' Hereby know we love, because he laid down 
his life for us.' The fact is, the old transcribers 
and translators were so full of a certain theology 
1 I Timothy iii. i6. 2 i joAw iii. 16. 



THE RESULTS OF REVISION 7I 

that they read it into the Bible on every possible 
occasion, and whenever they came to the pronoun 
' he ' for Jesus, naturally foisted into it their own 
doctrinal conceptions and at once changed it 
into the august name, God. 

What in the face of these and similar facts 
of revision are we to say to the candour of those 
who tell us that things are just as they were, 
and that no Christian doctrine has been affected 
one jot or tittle ? Many doctrines are affected. 
The word atonement no longer appears in the 
New Testament ; the word predestination is 
gone ; the word damnation is turned into 
judgment ; our vile body becomes the body of our 
humiliation, and the ascetics are robbed of a 
text which justified them in macerating the 
flesh. Fasting is now no longer commanded by 
Christ ; neither is it a command to search the 
Scriptures ; money is no longer the root of all 
evil, but a root of all kinds of evil. The great 
Trinitarian text, ' These three are one,^ is no more, 
and two important texts proving the Godhead of 
Christ are shown to have no reference whatever 
to that doctrine. These are great gains to a 
more reasonable creed. I know we may easily 
make too much of them, but, on the other hand, 
we are invited to make nothing of them. The 
Revised Version is of great doctrinal significance. 
It tends to break down the rigidity of orthodoxy. 



72 THE REVISED VERSION 

and it justifies that Liberal Christianity which we, 
in this place, hold and teach. We, at any rate, 
have every reason to be grateful for the help 
which the Revised Version gives us to a better 
understanding of the work of Christ and his 
Apostles. We who know the fatal force and 
fascination of words, and have learnt to realize 
the immense and inconceivable mistakes which 
have been made by nearly all English churches 
through the deficiencies and mistakes of the 
Authorized Version, welcome with the deepest 
thankfulness the Bible which the revisers have 
placed in our hands, as bringing before the 
English reader for the first time the true sense of 
inspired writers. 



V 

INFALLIBILITY 

* 
Those of you who have followed me with 
patience in the lectures already delivered will 
perhaps think it scarcely necessary to devote a 
whole evening to the subject of the infallibility 
of the Bible, since I have already given you many 
reasons to show the absurdity of such a doctrine. 
But the subject is so important, and the influence 
of the doctrine lingers so long, even when it has 
been formally abandoned, that I do not think it 
will be waste of time to look at it a little more 
closely. A doctrine which has been driven into 
the minds of English people for 300 years is not 
easily dislodged. Men will admit that it is with- 
out foundation, and yet they go on really acting 
upon it as if it had never been questioned. Look 
at the way men still appeal to ' texts ' when they 
want to prove an article in their creed, or to 
demolish a theological opponent. Right reason, 
scholarship, experience, human feeling, common 



74 INFALLIBILITY 

sense, all these are nothing if a text can be quoted 
on the other side. I remember a debate, some- 
what celebrated at the time, in which an evangelical 
clergyman persisted in interrupting his opponent 
by calling out ' Chapter and verse ! chapter and 
verse ! ' as though the very words were a magic 
talisman of error. And men who say they do 
not contend for the infallibility of the Bible yet 
confidently quote isolated texts as though they 
settled the matter in dispute. Thej^ are compelled 
when hard pressed to give up the doctrine of 
Infallibility ; but they think they can retain as 
tenaciously as ever the consequences and corollaries 
of the doctrine, phrases which spring out of it 
and have no meaning apart from it, and deductions 
which could flow from it alone. Look at the 
infinite efforts made by commentators and divines 
to explain discrepancies and reconcile contradic- 
tions, which, only that it is necessary to prove 
the Bible infallible, would have no significance 
whatever. 

I propose to show you two things : (i) That 
an infallible standard in faith and morals is not 
desirable ; and (2), if it is desirable, it is not to 
be found in the Bible. 

I. We know that in many trade matters, in 
disputes about weights and measures, quantity 
and quality, it is desirable to have infallible 
standards of judgment from which no appeal 



GUIDES AND ORACLES 75 

can be made. If we think we are cheated in the 
quantity of silk we buy, we can bring the shop- 
keeper's yard measure to an absolute test ; we 
can even send round inspectors of weights and 
measures to detect the slightest departure from 
the infallible standard. In the same way, men 
often think there ought to be some outward, 
visible, infallible standard of religious truth and 
moral right. For the journey of life is no easy 
business, and man naturally longs for some guid- 
ance along its difficult and dangerous paths. 
He says to himself, ' God, my maker, cannot have 
meant me to face these dread perils, these 
tremendous issues, unguided by his wisdom, 
unsustained by his hand. There must be some- 
where for me an infallible guide.' And having 
concluded, theoretically, that infalhble guidance 
must be somewhere, man has gone on to imagine 
it in this or that, or to create it out of his super- 
stitions, or has suffered himself to be deluded by 
priests, soothsayers, and oracles, that they have 
the sure and absolute truth. 

The Jews had their Urim and Thummim, 
enchanted stones kept in a pouch of the high 
priest's breastplate, and consulted for direction 
in all times of grave perplexity. According to 
one tradition these stones changed colour, showing 
bright before a victory and dark before a defeat ; 
while another tradition tells us that one stone 



76 INFALLIBILITY 

stood for * yes,' another for ' no,' and a third 
was neuter, and that the three were used as lots, 
the high priest giving answer according as the 
one or the other was drawn out. Whatever the 
method, it is clear that Urim and Thummim 
were instruments of divination by which it was 
thought the will of God was made known. The 
Bible is also full of references to Egyptian 

* magicians ' and their ' enchantments,' to 

* wizards,' ' sorcerers,' ' soothsayers,' all of whom 
professed to reveal the will of heaven, and to give 
infallible directions to those who observed their 
rites. The casting of lots was a favourite method 
of ascertaining the divine purpose. When the 
disciples, after the fall of Judas, met to elect a 
successor in his place, they chose two, and then, 
having prayed, they cast lots, and when the lot 
fell upon Matthias they supposed they had an 
infallible intimation of the will of God. Among 
the Romans the ' Sortes Virgilianae ' was a method 
of reading the future by consulting the ^Eneid 
of Virgil. You take up the book, open it at 
random, and the passage you touch by chance 
with your finger is the oracular response. The 
same method has been used with the Bible right 
up to our own time, and is called ' Sortes Biblicae.' 
The Greeks had their oracles at Delphi and at 
Dodona. At Dodona, those gifted with the 
power to interpret listened to the rustling of the 



THE CRAVING FOR ASSURANCE 77 

leaves in an ancient oak, or to the moaning of 
doves in its branches, or to the resounding of the 
wind in the brazen tripods that surrounded the 
Temple, professing to gain in this manner a know- 
ledge of the future. You will remember how, 
in the ' Winter's Tale,' Shakespeare makes 
Hermione, the wrongfully-accused Queen, appeal 
to the oracle of Apollo at Delphos. In Rome there 
were soothsayers and diviners, who watched the 
flights of certain birds and the movements of 
certain sacred animals, so claiming to interpret 
the will of the gods. To refer again to Shakes- 
peare : when Julius Caesar has misgivings about 
the fatal procession to the Capitol, he says to 
his servant, ' Go bid the priests do sacrifice, 
and bring me their opinions of success.' ' What 
say the augurers ? ' he asks when the servant 
returns, who replies — 

They would not have you stir forth to-day ; 
Plucking the entrails of an offering forth. 
They could not find a heart within the beast. 

It is this craving which men have for guidance, 
this shrinking from coming to a decision for 
themselves, this disinclination to take the trouble 
to judge what is right and wrong, that has given 
strength in the Roman Church to the dogma of 
the Pope's Infallibility, and in Protestant 
Churches to the dogma of the Infallibility of the 



y^ INFALLIBILITY 

Bible. Men are cowards ; they shrink Irom 
personal responsibility ; they dread the sweat 
and the struggle of mental and spiritual conflict ; 
they want things made easy and to be saved 
from the burden and care of exercising personal 
judgment ; they would even give up that glorious 
prerogative of manhood, Free Will, if they could 
be sure of infallible guidance. In a remarkable 
passage Professor Huxley has told us that if some 
Power would undertake to wind him up like a 
watch every twenty-four hours so that he should 
infallibly do right, he would gladly give up his 
freedom of will. It is this feeling which, more 
than any other, induces men to go over to the 
Church of Rome. They want to be saved aU 
these questions, all this trouble of choosing and 
judging for themselves ; they want an easy time, 
and are glad to hand over moral and religious 
problems to the decision of anyone who will 
undertake for them. Yet natural and almost 
inevitable as is this craving, it is not healthy, 
it is not desirable ; and that it is not so is shown 
in the fact that it has never been gratified.. 
Guidance — yes, we all need that, and we all may 
have it ; but not to the abnegation of our own 
reason and judgment. Infallible guidance is 
impossible if men are to be really virtuous, 
strong, wise, and capable : it means that men are 
to give up Free Will and become automata. 



HOW TO THINK 79 

But without Free Will what virtue is there in 
what I do ? If I cannot make a mistake, there 
is no goodness in doing right. If everything is 
to be settled for me, I lose the best part of mental 
and spiritual training — the training I go through 
in learning to judge, to reason, to form conclusions, 
to come to a decision. 

We all understand the difference between 
teaching an intelligent boy what to think and 
how to think. Suppose that he has a problem to 
solve, or a sentence in a classical author to translate. 
The teacher may show him the solution in a 
moment, or read the sentence to him in English. 
So far he understands it — he knows what it means. 
He knows that sentence perfectly, hut it is all 
he knows. There is, however, another way. 
The teacher may spend much time in instructing 
the boy, not only in the meaning of a particular 
sentence, but as to how sentences are formed, 
how the parts of a sentence are related, how to 
look in any sentence for the verb and the noun, 
and how their inflexions bear on the sense. The 
boy may not for the moment be able to teU what 
this particular sentence means as glibly as his 
comrade who has had it read off to him in English ; 
but he is in the way of understanding in time, 
not this sentence only, but all sentences, and of 
attaining to a perfect knowledge of the language. 
But you know no boy will master a language 



So INFALLIBILITY 

who has the sentences infaUibly translated for 
hira, or who has a crib to which he can always 
refer. You teach him how sentences are made, 
and then you throw him on his own resources, 
sure that in blundering is the only way to 
acquire mastery. 

So it is in morals, so it is in religion. If every- 
thing were settled for us we should have no mental 
and no spiritual training, and at the end we should 
be just as much babies as ever. God does give 
us guidance ; he puts certain great principles 
into our hands ; he gives us a sense of right and 
wrong ; he gives us reason, and conscience, and 
affection — divine lights and voices within us. 
But he does not send a visible, tangible guide 
with us through the unknown desert, to mark 
out every step for us, and to spare us all anxiety 
about the road. He rather instructs us as to the 
character of the country, the landmarks, the 
bearings of the stars, and leaves us to find our way 
for ourselves, assuring us that he is not ignorant 
of or indifferent to our prayers. We shall make 
blunders, but we shall be gaining power ; we shall 
fall into mistakes, but we shall be training our 
reason, so that at last we are not babes but men. 
God will have us know for ourselves — not because 
he speaks to us through some infallible authority, 
but because by thinking, observing, experimenting, 
our natures are trained into nobler goodness and 



ONE BOOK, MANY OPINIONS 8l 

into clearer wisdom than could ever be possible 
under infallible guidance. 

2. My second point is that if such an infallible 
guide be desirable, it is not to be found in the Bible. 
As an infallible guide the Bible must be condemned 
for a lamentable failure. If it be an infallible 
directory for faith and conduct, telling men what to 
think and do, the differing sects and Churches of 
Christendom are an amazing phenomenon. Every 
sect goes to the Bible and finds there the infallible 
justification it looks for. The Pope gets out of 
one passage the doctrine of the Church's authority 
to forgive sins ; the priest gets out of another 
passage the rite and dogma of baptismal regenera- 
tion ; the Mormon gets out of it a sanction for 
polygamy ; the monk draws from it the dogma 
that man's body is corrupt and must be macerated ; 
the Independent finds that there ought to be no 
bishops ; the Trinitarian that Jesus is God ; the 
Unitarian that Jesus was only a man. The 
Calvinist finds the election of the few ; the 
Universalist the salvation of all. All go to the 
same source, and yet all draw different conclusions. 
Where, then, is its infallibility if it speaks with 
such different voices ? Here is the chronic 
difficulty — a revelation of truth, God's own 
truth from God's own Hps, as many believe ; 
and yet, among those who with their whole 
hearts accept the revelation, infinite diversities. 



82 INFALLIBILITY 

internecine strifes over these very words of the 
Eternal. 

To treat the Bible as if it were an infallible 
receipt-book for all difficulties and doctrines, 
and apply its texts, most likely wrenched out of 
all connexion with the subjects on which they 
were meant to bear, to the easy solution of all 
controversies, as though the mere letter of one 
sentence settled everything, and the intellect 
had no other duty than that of humble 
acquiescence, is to make it an idol. 

Do not misunderstand me. Once more, I 
repeat, I want to loosen no one's hold on the 
substantial truth of the Bible. But substantial 
truth is one thing, infallible truth is another. 
We have guidance in the Bible about the greatest 
matters — about God and duty, about righteous- 
ness and holy living, about love and peace and 
justice and immortality. We have the substantial 
truth ; but we have also errors, mistakes, con- 
fusions, contradictions, and we have to get at 
the truth by the exercise of reason, judgment, 
and conscience. 

I have already shown you that the English 
Bible is not free from error, and to contend for 
that would be contending that the translators, 
copyists, and printers were all miraculously 
preserved from mistake. What are the people 
who have held the Infallibility of the Authorized 



TRIFLING MISTAKES 83 

Version of the New Testament to say to the fact I 
mentioned last Sunday, that the Revised Version 
contains 36,000 changes ? I have shown you 
that there is no Greek and no Hebrew text free 
from error, and that no two of those ancient MSS. 
absolutely agree. The usual answer made to 
this mode of dealing with the question is, of 
course, that it is hypercritical : that it makes a 
mountain of a mole hill : that the mistakes of 
copyists and translators are altogether trifling. 
But a trifling mistake destroys infallibility. A 
thing is either perpendicular or it is not ; there 
are no such things as degrees of perpendicularity. 
There are no such things as degrees of infallibility. 
One mistake vitiates the whole claim, for if the 
authority is mistaken on one point, what 
guarantee have we that it may not be mistaken 
on another ? It is admitted that literally and 
verbally the Bible is not infallible, but we are 
told this does not matter. Although not infallible 
it contains the infallible word of God. And so, 
divines, having conceded our point of the fallibility 
of the Bible, are yet extremely angry when we 
point out that the world was not made in six days, 
or that it is not true that the Almighty approved 
of the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites, 
or that the morality of the Pentateuch is defective. 
It is a fallible book, but it must not be questioned ! 
And they are in the greatest fright if one bolder 



84 INFALLIBILITY 

than the rest ventures to tell the people that 
Matthew and Luke are at irreconcilable variance 
about the pedigree of Jesus, or that Peter niis- 
applies a psalm, or that Paul was quite mistaken 
when he prophesied the immediate coming of 
Christ. The speaker is denounced as an Atheist, 
and a tremendous amount of devout ingenuity, 
or, rather, indevout acuteness, is shown in the 
attempt to reconcile discrepancies or explain 
away plain statements by forcing on them 
allegorical meanings. When pushed in a corner 
the fallibility is admitted ; but in practical use 
men go on treating the Bible as if the dogma of 
its infallibility had never been questioned. 

Where, then, you may ask, is infallible guidance 
to be found ? I answer, you cannot divest your- 
self of responsibility ; you must judge, yon must 
think, you must decide, believing that God's 
spirit is as surely within you to-day as it ever was 
within Isaiah or John ; and that an inspiration 
as true, as real as that which ever prophet or 
apostle reached is yours, if you will. The inspira- 
tion of the men of old in awakening the conscience, 
proves not the possibility only, but the actual 
reality of a present communion with the Father. 
When once this is felt, then a criterion of truth 
is given better far, because more educational in 
its influence, than any outward infallible standard. 
' For God must be better than the best we can 



THE INWARD WITNESS 85 

think, juster and purer than our highest thought, 
more loving, tender, and patient than our com- 
passion's widest reach. Ask, then, when other 
certainties fail, does this or that view of religious 
truth most enlarge and deepen my love to God 
and man ? Do I feel more the embrace of a divine 
Life when I try to believe in everlasting damnation, 
or when I trust the larger hope ? What is most 
congruous with the essential conditions of thought 
and springs of feeling within me, a universe of 
lifeless atoms, or a world that lives and moves 
and has its being in God ? ' How do I most 
worthily think of God — when I think of him as 
damning little children for a sin which they never 
committed, but which Adam committed ; or 
when I think of him as loving a little child more 
tenderly than its mother ? Trust your best 
instincts, your most humane feelings, your finest 
sense of truth and justice ; trust them, rather 
than the letters of a book, as the voice of God 
within you. These things are his ' kindly light,' 
promising to every active, earnest soul, a clearer 
day, a brighter experience, a higher truth. Keep 
your face towards the light, in the direction of 
purer feeling, larger charity, firmer self-control, 
more faithful loyalty to the duty and the truth 
you know, for then you will be guided better 
than by some infallible standard. Why should 
you be alarmed at following the light of God 



86 INFALLIBILITY 

within you rather than the words of a book ? 
' God will not condemn you for any intellectual 
mistake, but only for the disloyalty of soul 
which will not follow the guidance of his spirit 
towards a higher tone of life and a larger-hearted 
faith. But he who in reverence, sincerity, and 
self-sacrifice follows the bright shining of God's 
light, may feel assured that, like a ship with its 
compass, he carries a guide with him which 
shall bring him right at last.'^ 

1 See J. A. Picton's New Theories and Old Faith for a masterly- 
discussion of the whole subject. 



VI 

INSPIRATION 

Some years ago I was drawn into a religious 
discussion with an earnest-minded man who, 
when I questioned the authority of a text he had 
quoted, turned round upon me and said : ' But 
do you beHeve in the inspiration of the Bible ? ' 
' That,' I answered, ' entirely depends on what 
you mean by inspiration.' ' Oh, come,' said he, 
* don't let us have any quibbling about words. 
A plain question can have a plain answer. Do 
you or do you not believe in the inspiration of 
the Bible ? ' ' I do not call that a plain question,* 
I replied ; ' and while I have no desire to quibble 
about words, I must yet decline to palter with 
words in a double sense. Tell me what you mean 
by inspiration, and I'U tell you what I believe.* 
' Oh,' said he, ' I see what you are at ; you want 
to keep the word and to say you believe in it 
after you have emptied it of all that it has ever 
meant. Inspiration means for me that all that is 



S8 INSPIRATION 

taught in the Bible came from God, or it means 
nothing.' 

Now this is an illustration of the difficulty 
a liberal and reforming theologian finds himself 
in when dealing with religious problems. There 
are large numbers of men who refuse to believe 
that words can have any other meaning than 
that which they have always understood them to 
bear, or that doctrines can be restated to suit the 
growing intelligence of the age. Dr. Abbott 
calls them the Conservatives in Religion — the 
people who want to keep everything as it is. 
That is a plain and easy policy, and is no small 
commendation in a busy age. The same thing 
is true of the position taken up by sceptics and 
iconoclasts — the party who would destroy every- 
thing, and who say that all these old doctrines 
and beliefs are false. That also is a plain and 
easy policy. ' To preserve everything as it is, or 
to destroy everything root and branch, either of 
these has the merit of simplicity and ease, appreci- 
able by the laziest of minds in the laziest of 
humours. But the policy of the Reformers — of 
the party of Growth and Progress — now involving 
partial destruction and now partial conservation, 
is by no means of this plain, simple, easy kind. 
It obhges them to discriminate, to give reasons 
for destroying some things and preserving others, 
and to justify their choice. But to discriminate, 



CONSERVATIVES AND DESTRUCTIVES 89 

how tedious ! And to justify discrimination, how 
dull for the reader of the justification ! ' 

The orthodox people say, ' You must accept 
the scriptures in a lump as the Word of God.' 
Why ? Because if you once begin to weigh 
evidence and discriminate there is no telling where 
you will stop. But the sceptics say, ' You must 
reject the Scriptures as the word of God in toto.^ 
Why ? Because it is impossible to discriminate 
between one part and another. It is not the 
first time that the orthodox and the sceptics 
have joined hands against the Reformers, 
declaring that the old doctrine of the infallibility 
of the Bible and the old methods of interpretation 
are the only reasonable ones. So with regard 
to the doctrine of the Inspiration of the Bible, 
both Conservatives and Destructives are alike 
agreed that it can only mean what they declare 
it always has meant — that every word of the Bible 
came from God. But the Reformers side with 
neither — the}^ discriminate. They deny that all 
is true or that all is false. They assume as 
a matter of reasonable expectation that in the 
texts of the Old and New Testaments there will 
be found errors which it is the duty of earnest, 
honest, capable students to discover and remove. 
The removal or acknowledgment of these errors 
does not prove that other portions of this great 
literature are false. The discovery of mistakes 



90 INSPIRATION 

and discrepancies in the gospel narrative does 
not affect our faith in the life and character there 
revealed — a life and character to which testimony 
is borne, not by isolated texts, but by the New 
Testament as a whole, and by the whole life of 
the Christian Church. When astronomers by 
their disputations about the spots on the sun, shall 
succeed in blotting out the sun itself from the 
heavens, then, and not till then, will religious 
reformers apprehend any danger that criticisms 
of the gospel history will efface Jesus of Nazareth 
from the affections of mankind. 

It is difficult, if not impossible, to frame a 
logical theory of inspiration which shall adequately 
express one's belief in the reality and permanence 
of one of the greatest factors in human life and 
development. My quarrel with the orthodox 
doctrine is, not that it asserts too much but that 
it asserts too little — ^that it is narrow and local. 
Confining Inspiration to a book, an age, and a 
race, and failing to take into account the varied 
forms under which it manifests itself, the popular 
orthodox doctrine is entirely inadequate. If 
we believe in God as the everywhere present, the 
everywhere quickening spirit, whose is the 
beautiful grace by which all good is wrought, in 
whom each man lives his little life from morning 
until evening, whose light hghtens the ages and 
the nations as they advance from stage to stage 



INSPIRATION UNIVERSAL QI 

of progress, then we see that Inspiration has been 
present with humanity through all its history, 
beaming brightly here, showing dimly there, 
but never absent from the seeking heart. My 
doctrine of Inspiration is not a light which makes 
all lands dark except Palestine, and all books 
secular except the Bible, but one which casts an 
interpreting ray into many a pathetic oi terrible 
superstition by which men have felt after God 
if haply they might find him. It is a doctrine 
which enables me to hear the same music in 
many tongues. This is not to deny that in some 
tongues the music has had a volume, sweetness, 
and force which have made that particular 
manifestation of it peculiarly suggestive of a 
heavenly source. But in kind the power is every- 
where the same ; it only differs in degree. Every 
good and holy thought, every noble deed, every 
high endeavour, every pure aspiration, is by and 
through so much of God as works in humanity ; 
for without him we can do nothing. Inspiration 
is natural to the human race, and its degree is 
determined by character and capacity. All men 
have it ; some more, some less, according as 
their natures are large or small, and according as 
they open their minds to truth and their hearts 
to goodness. Touching some words in the Bible, 
I do not believe them to be inspired at all. But 
when I come to other portions language is all too 



92 INSPIRATION 

poor to express my sense of the glory and fullness 
of the inspiration they reveal. From what foun- 
tain but God's Spirit could have come any one 
of a hundred passages from both Old and New 
Testaments that instantly flash on our minds 
when we think of what is brightest in religion. 
At what spring but that of the world's purest, 
sweetest inspiration could all these men have 
drunk whose words have sounded down the ages, 
thrilling the hearts of untold millions as human 
hearts have never else been thrilled ? 

But what do I mean by Inspiration ? Absolute 
freedom from error ? Not at all, for the treasure 
is in earthen vessels — the heavenly light shone 
through human minds and took of their colour 
and weakness. Do I mean Infallibility ? Not 
at all, for a man may be divinely moved to act 
and speak and yet not act and speak with in- 
fallibility. As a whole he may be true, but there 
will be weakness and imperfection here and there. 
Do I mean that these words are really God's 
words ? Not at all. They are human words, 
every one of them, but they were uttered when 
the hearts and the minds of men were under en- 
nobling influence caught by communion with God. 

I do not know any better definition of Inspira- 
tion than that given by Mr. Greg in his Creed of 
Christendom — ' That elevation of all the spiritual 
faculties by the action of God upon the heart, which 



NOTES OF INSPIRATION 93 

is shared by all devout minds, though in different 
degrees, and which is consistent with many errors."* 

Inspiration is a continuous though variable 
force in the development and progress of mankind. 

There are at least three elements we look for 
in an inspired utterance, by which we may dis- 
criminate the pure gold from baser metal. 

I. Spontaneity. By spontaneity I mean that 
which is free, simple, and original. Anything 
laboured, anything artificial, anything that is a 
mere echo or platitude, shuts itself out at once 
from the inspired. A special note of inspiration 
is that it is not bound about by rule and custom 
and creed, but goes back farther than these 
to the simple feelings of the common heart, 
to the intuitions and instincts of uncorrupted 
human nature. It is free. It is also simple. 
It does not deal with the obscure or temporary 
phases of thought, nor does it study the trickeries 
of speech. It speaks the language of the universal 
human heart. Then it is original, but always 
how it does not know. For genius never knows the 
secret and cause of its finest products ; its best 
thoughts come to it as surprises of light ; and the 
new truths it gives to the world, it has discovered, 
not invented. I suppose there never was an 
inspired work yet, the source of which the author 
could explain. There was an illumination, an 
impulse, a suggestion from above, and the word 



94 INSPIRATION 

was spoken which burns for ever in letters of 
fire on the forehead of the morning sky. It is 
true, these things came not without human effort ; 
but no amount of human effort will account for 
them or produce them. Every true thinker 
recognizes that his thoughts are gifts. He works 
to attain them, but the attainment is not the 
result of work alone. He has seasons of dryness 
when all his work is of no avail ; and then again, 
there comes a renewal of life and light, from what 
far-off sources he knows not, except that whenever 
he is really original the source is not in himself. 
Now, there have been men in different ages, 
and in different parts of the world, gifted spirits, 
strong in righteousness, and endowed with the 
insight and the foresight of goodness, who have 
perceived far more than their fellow-men the 
open secret of the world ; have been more pro- 
foundly conscious of the presence and power of 
God, have lived more habitually in communion 
with the Father of Spirits, who have spoken with 
authority — the authority which belongs to wisdom, 
character, insight, and the subordination of self 
to the will of God. There has been in these men ■ 
the sense of suggestion from above. Their truth 
was not their own, but a discovery, and a gift, a 
surprise to themselves as well as others. Such a 
one is not his own : he is as though possessed 
by a power greater than his will, beyond his control, 



SPONTANEITY 95 

vaster than his imagination. This element of 
spontaneity must be kept in mind if we would 
gain a true idea of inspiration. 
^ It is not always present in a man ; sometimes 
it leaves him. It is what old Herrick said : — 

It is not every day that I 
Fitted am to prophesy ; 
No, but when the spirit fills 
The fantastic panicles, 
Full of fire, then I write 
As the Goddess doth indite. 
Thus, enraged, my lines are hurled, 
Like the sybils through the world : 
Look how next the holy fire 
Either slakes or doth retire : 
So the fancy cools — till when 
That brave spirit comes again. 

So also sings a nobler poet, George Herbert. 
His health had broken down, and he had lost all 
power of song. But 

Now in age I bud again, 

After so many deaths I Uve and write ; 
Once more I smell the dew and rain, 
And relish versing : O my only Hght, 
It cannot be 
That I am he 
On whom thy tempests fell all night. 

This then is the first note of an inspired soul — 
spontaneity. He acts and speaks as under an 



96 INSPIRATION 

impulse, which is not always with him, which he 
did not create, but which is from above. 

2. When we say of any man, that he spoke 
or acted like one inspired, we generally imply 
that his speech or action was characterized by 
an exalted moral tone. We talk, indeed, of poetic 
inspiration ; but it jars on the conscience to 
ascribe that to any poetic utterance which is morally 
bad. Poetry is moral — the better the poetry the 
higher the moral tone ; the finest is like the verse 
of Saadi, which the angels testified ' met the 
approbation of Allah in heaven. "" ' In poetry,'' 
said Goethe, ' only the really great and pure advances 
us.'' Men of genius have sometimes debased 
their genius, and written things full of vice and 
pruriency. But not by their utterances in these 
moods do they live in the grateful hearts of men, 
but by quite other utterances, when they rise 
above such moods into the fine, keen air of moral 
truth and right. Byron's ' Don Juan ' is a work 
of genius, but of genius which owed much to 
frequent sips of ardent spirits. It would be 
utterly incongruous to speak of ' Don Juan ' 
as inspired. But when we read ' Hamlet ' or 
* Macbeth,' we feel that those plays are full of 
impulse received from above ; for while they 
were not written to teach this or that moral lesson, 
they do what is far better, they purify the springs 
of thought and feeling, out of which morality 



UNIVERSALITY OF APPEAL 97 

flows. In all great poems, as in all great 
prophetic utterances and in all great pictures, 
there is this moral exaltation, the ideals of the soul 
are refined and uplifted. All life is ennobled by 
Handel's ' Messiah,' by Raphael's ' Madonnas,' 
by Shakespeare's plays, even as it is by the Book 
of Psalms. 

3. Inspiration is that which is of universal 
application. If any utterance is only for an age, 
and local in its interpretation, we do not regard 
it as inspired. The Psalms, for instance, were 
mostly suggested by local considerations, the 
trials, the joys, the experiences of David and 
others, under peculiar circumstances. But, never- 
theless, we feel as we read them that they pass 
beyond the limits of the local and the individual — 
they belong to humanity — they are true of 
human nature and life ever3Avhere. Or take 
Christ's prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem. 
It was spoken at Jerusalem about Jerusalem, 
and in a manner which seemed hmited to 
Jerusalem. But had the prophecy been true only 
of that city of sorrows, it would never have been 
regarded as inspired. Whereas Christ's principle 
was this : that the doom pronounced on Jerusalem 
was universally applicable, and that it was but 
a style and specimen of God's judgment every- 
where. The judgment comes wherever there is 
evil grown ripe for judgment, wherever corruption 



98 INSPIRATION 

is complete. And the gathering of the Roman 
,eagles to the carcase is but a specimen of the way 
in which judgment at last overtakes any city, any 
country, and any man in whom evil has reached 
the point where there is no possibility of cure. 
We who have lived through the last fifty years 
have seen the eagles gathered together in Naples, 
in America, in France, in Bulgaria. The Lord's 
judgment on Jerusalem has been fulfilled many 
times — it was not simply of local but of universal 
application. 

Look at the Beatitudes, look at the parables 
of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, 
look at Paul's noble hymn on charity, look at 
Isaiah's utterances ; all these are everywhere 
true, and come home to men of all times and all 
conditions. They touch the human heart with 
pathos, wherever there is a heart to feel ; they 
tell men what is fairest and noblest and divinest 
in life, whatsoever their creed and church. They 
are universal. We say, then, of one who is 
inspired, that he speaks and acts with spontaneity ; 
that there is in his words and deeds a certain 
unmistakable moral elevation ; and lastly, that 
his utterances are of universal significance and 
application. 

I do not say that all utterances marked by these 
three notes of inspiration stand on the same 
level of beauty and authority. The spark in a 



DEGREES OF INSPIRATION 99 

Leyden jar is just as truly a manifestation of 
electricity as the lightning flash that ploughs 
its fiery furrow across the midnight sky ; but the 
one is a manifestation on a much more impressive 
scale than the other. We do not call the electric 
spark in a Leyden jar a flash of lightning, although 
it is that in essence ; and we do not call all those 
utterances inspired which while possessing the 
notes of inspiration, possess them on too small 
a scale to win the attention. All souls that love 
and pray and choose between right and wrong 
are inspired ; but between these souls and the 
great luminous names that shine as stars for ever 
— Isaiah, Moses, Buddha, John, Socrates — there 
is the same difference as between the spark of the 
Leyden jar and a flash of lightning. 

And as we say of scenes in nature peculiarly 
suggestive of all-embracing life that they are 
Divinely fair, so we say of thoughts and w^ords 
and teachers and prophets peculiarly instinct with 
moral grandeur, they are Divinely inspired. So 
we say of the Bible — it is the inspired book of the 
world ; not that it is infallible ; not that it is 
free from error ; but that in its utterances we find 
as we find nowhere else in like fashion, spontaneity, 
moral exaltation, and universal significance. 

But I am still asked, How may I discern be- 
tween that which is inspired in the Bible and that 
which is not ? To say that I must take it all 



100 INSPIRATION 

or give it all up is as great folly as it would be 
to say that men must either give up the use of 
com as food or consume it husks and all. The 
question with us is simply to what extent do the 
utterances of the Bible make the impression of 
inspiration on the heart ? With what decree of 
power do they quicken conscience, and appeal 
to what is best within us, and stir up the thought 
of God ? There are two utterances lying side 
by side in the Bible, one of which indeed touches 
me to the quick, while the other is to my feeling 
as dead and powerless as a mummy. May I 
take the one and leave the other ? Why not ? 
I cannot prove to you that both are alike good. 
No one can. What a man's own heart proves 
to him as good is the only thing that is good 
to him. His neighbour may tell him there is 
light in a certain utterance, warmth, and 
heavenly food. But if when he goes to it he finds 
neither light nor warmth nor heavenly food, 
it will only be hypocrisy in him to pretend other- 
wise. If he be a humble man he will be slow 
to say there is nothing inspired in an utterance 
which others have found helpful ; he will not 
hastily set aside as of no value things which at 
present are to him as the letters of a foreign 
alphabet. He will wait ; he will investigate ; 
he will try the discriminating power of these 
notes of inspiration we have been considering. If 



DISCRIMINATION NEEDED 10 1 

the utterance will not stand the application of 
such a test he may be tolerably sure that the 
instinctive feeling of his heart has not played 
him false. Let us take one instance only — the 
utterance of Jesus as given in Luke xxii. when the 
disciples disputed among themselves which of 
them should be greatest in the kingdom. ' And 
he said unto them (v. 25) The kings of the Gentiles 
exercise lordship over them : and they that exercise 
authority upon them are called benefactors. But 
ye shall not he so : hut he that is greatest among 
yoUy let him be as the younger ; and he that is chief , 
as he that doth serve. For whether is greater, he 
that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth ? is not he 
that sitteth at meat ? hut I am among you as he that 
serveth. Ye are they which have continued with 
me in my temptations. And I appoint unto you 
a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me ; 
that ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, 
and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of 
Israel.'' The first part of this answer presents 
no difficulty either to the understanding or the 
heart. It is perfectly in keeping with many other 
sayings of Jesus ; and not only his sayings, 
but with his whole life and character. We know 
that the Great Teacher laid most impressive 
emphasis on the virtues of humility and service. 
In the washing of his disciples' feet he acted as 
it were a striking parable which they could never 



102 INSPIRATION 

forget. Once before, when this same dispute 
had arisen, he rebuked his disciples by means 
of a little child. ' He that is greatest among you, 
let him he as the younger ; and he that is chief, 
as he that doth serve. I am among you as one that 
serveth' But then follow the words, 'And I 
appoint unto you a kingdom — that ye may eat 
and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on 
thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.'' What 
are we to make of such a saying ? It is quite 
incongruous with all the rest. It seems to say, 
humility is only necessary for a little while ; have 
patience and be submissive now ; presently you 
will have dominion and sit on thrones as judges 
of the tribes of Israel. But humility and service 
are virtues everywhere and in all places, in heaven 
as on earth ; and Jesus cannot have meant that 
humility would some day have its reward by 
being exchanged for rule and power ! On the 
contrary, he was utterly opposed to such ideas. 
Is this then an inspired utterance out of Christ's 
mouth, or has it crept into the narrative from 
other sources ? Let us try it by the three notes 
of inspiration. No one will say that it was an 
utterance marked by spontaneity, for it was 
just an echo of the earthly, worldly kingdom 
with which the disciples so persistently dazzled 
and deceived themselves as with a mirage of the 
desert, and which Jesus so constantly condemned. 



JEWISH IDEALS IO3 

He will have nothing to do with a kingdom 
in which there are thrones and palaces, and again 
and again he has to remind his disciples that 
' the kingdom of God is within yon.'' Is it marked 
by moral exaltation ? So far from that, we 
are let down by these words at once to a lower 
level of thought and feeling, and an element is 
introduced which is positively immoral — the 
promise of future reward and compensation for 
the suffering of present humiliation. Humility 
is not a good to be sought for its own sake, carry- 
ing its own reward and blessedness with it ; but 
it is to be endured as the stepping-stone to proud 
dominion. ' Sitting on thrones judging the twelve 
tribes of Israel.'^ Is it of universal application ? 
On the contrary, it is narrow, exclusive, local, 
and Jewish. We know what Jewish ideals and 
Jewish expectations were at that time. We 
find these ideals and expectations filling the 
disciples' minds. We know that they had no 
place in Jesus' mind. Yet, here we have Jesus 
reported as reproducing at second hand the 
commonplaces of Jewish expectation. What shall 
we conclude but that this is no part of the utter- 
ance of Jesus at aU, since it is so painfully 
incongruous with all else he taught and with his 
whole character ? It is one of those Jewish 
conceptions that have degraded the church 
and given rise to the fanaticisms of Fifth- 



104 INSPIRATION 

Monarchy men and others — instructive instances 
of the ' reign of the saints ! ' And if this habit 
of discriminating between one utterance and 
another is called eclecticism, I will remind you 
of a somewhat rude answer given by Carlyle to a 
charge of teaching Pantheism — ' / care not if it he 
Pot-theism if it he true.^ 

The great test of the inspiration of any scripture 
is its power to touch the common heart of the 
race. David may or may not be the author of 
the twenty-third Psalm ; but all can feel the truth 
and inspiration of the words, ' The Lord is my 
shepherd, I shall not want J I am told that John 
wrote in his epistle, ' He that loveth not knoweth 
not God, for God is love.'' Two questions arise-r- 
hrst, did John say it ? and secondly, is it true ? 
Now I do not know whether John said it or not ; 
I have no means of knowing ; I have only the 
tradition in this ancient record. But what of 
that ? Is it true ? For me it is no matter 
whether John said it or one writing in his name ; 
it is equally good and true whoever said it. I 
believe he did say it ; but if you can prove to me 
that he did not say it, and show me that this 
verse in his epistle was inserted in the third 
century, or even in more recent times, and is 
no part of the Bible at all, it makes no difference. 
I shall say it is inspired whoever said it. It 
comes home ; it answers to the best that is in me, 



THE ONE RELIGION IO5 

it has the notes of spontaneity, of moral exaltation, 
and^of universal significance. 

There is, we know, one primitive and sure 

Religion pure. 
Unchanged in spirit, though its forms and codes 

Wear myriad modes — 
Contains all creeds within its mighty span, 
The love of God displayed in love for man. 



VII 

MISTAKES IN THE BIBLE 

It is told of a great scientific man of our day 
that when he first visited Rome and went into 
the Vatican, he sat down before Raphael's ' Trans- 
figuration ' and filled three pages of his notebook 
with its faults. It was the most natural thing 
in the world for him to do. How should he, a 
physicist, approve of three figures suspended in 
the air in defiance of the laws of gravitation ? 
Or what could a zoologist say to an angel out- 
rageously combining in his person the wings of 
a bird and the legs of man ? There were plenty 
of faults to be found, and he found them ! 

Yet what an odious and repulsive task for a 
man to set himself ! What a carping mind it 
reveals that a man should be first of all struck 
with the defects of a noble work of art, and not 
with its beauty and grandeur ! What an utter 
Philistine a man must be who could occupy him- 
self in studying, not the genuine poetry and 



SPOTS ON THE SUN IO7 

beautiful colouring of the picture, but its faults ! 
' Oh, yes,' you would answer impatiently, ' but 
did you ever see anything more grand in its 
conception ? Look at the power, at the spiritual 
expression, at the grace ; do you not feel the 
inspiration ? ' 

Now you may think that I am only just such 
a Philistine in directing your attention to the 
mistakes in the Bible, as if a man of crooked, 
captious mind, looking at the sun should only 
see its spots, or another looking at a great picture 
should only see its faults. But I should be utterly 
ashamed of myself if that were my attitude of 
mind. I have said much in previous lectures 
to show you my profound sense of the value, 
the preciousness, the inspiration, and the eternal 
benediction of the Bible. It is because of my sense 
of its value that I wish to put reverence for it 
on a reasonable ground. It is because I want to 
get it loved and honouied for right reasons that 
I attack the wrong reasons which are put forward 
for love and reverence. The old reasons and 
claims have brought it into discredit, and it is 
to prove the unsoundness of those views that 
I direct your attention to the mistakes of the Biblel 
For, suppose that Raphael's ' Transfiguration ' 
had been elevated by a number of its admirers 
into a position above all other pictures ; suppose 
we were told that it was the only inspired picture 



I08 MISTAKES IN THE BIBLE 

in the world ; suppose students of art were taught 
that it gave us the only true scheme of colour 
and the only right way in which to compose a 
picture ; and that it was so perfect as to be the 
model, in all its details, for artists in all time ? 
Do you not think it might become the duty of 
some honest spirit to declare that this was not 
so, and to prove it by a study of the mistakes 
in the picture ? Would you say such an honest 
critic was an enemy of Raphael ? You would 
say he was a friend. Raphael would have been 
the last man in the world to claim infallibility 
for his picture, or to set it on a pedestal by itself, 
apart from all other pictures. If the ' Trans- 
figuration ' is to be thus foolishly exalted, and 
made the only standard of form and colour and 
composition, then it becomes a sacred duty to 
show that it has defects. So it is with the Bible, 
and I need not further apply the parable. 

Further, one of the very best helps to a right 
understanding and true appreciation of the Bible 
is to convince ourselves of the liability of its 
writers to mistake. 

It is perfectly clear that the Bible writers both 
could err and did err. Let us take one little 
instance — quite insignificant, which does not 
matter in the least, and yet which is typical. 
There are two accounts in the New Testament 
of St. Paul's conversion brought about by a voice 



THE PROCESS OF ' RECONCILIATION ' I09 

from heaven. In one place m the Acts we are 
told St. Paul's conapanions heard the voice ; 
but in another place in the Acts we are told they 
did not hear the voice, but Paul only. That is 
a plain contradiction, and one or other of the 
statements is a mistake. It does not matter ; it 
is not of the least importance. But if the Bible 
is infallible, then it is of great importance ; for 
in order to bolster up the infallibility of the Bible 
you have to show that there is no contradiction. 
Need I say that, by a curious twisting of plain 
words, this has been done, and that the two 
statements have been ' reconciled,' as it is called. 
They have been ' reconciled ' over and over 
again, and in various ways ; but only by methods 
which you would be ashamed to apply to any 
other book' — methods which are the opprobrium 
of Bible criticism, and by which (as Bishop Butler 
says) anything can be made to mean anything. 
There is between the two statements a contradic- 
tion as clear as can be.-"- The contradiction 
proves nothing against the good faith of the 
reporters — it only proves that one of them was 
mistaken. What does it matter ? Nothing at 
all to me ; and takes nothing from the value 
of the story. But to the Infallibilist it means 
much, and must be reconciled. 

Look at the way in which the plain statement 

1 See Literature and Dogma, p. 138. 



110 MISTAKES IN THE BIBLE 

of the creation of the world in six days is explained 
away by these ' reconcilers.' Geology put all 
the believers in the letter of Genesis into frightful 
confusion. First they denied the conclusions of 
geology ; then they said ' days ' did not mean 
* days/ but 'ages'; and now, at last, they 
seem to have agreed that Genesis is the unfortunate 
Jonah on board the otherwise infallible ship, 
and must be given up to devouring storms of 
criticism. Every other part is miraculously in- 
spired, but this may be doubted. What miserable 
subterfuges are these ! What does it matter if 
Genesis is mistaken ? Nothing at all. On a 
matter of science I should expect it to be mistaken. 
I can read it with just as great profit as before ; 
but if I believe every word of the Bible to be 
inspired, why, then I am in a painful dilemma. 
So far from believing, that if we give up the old 
theory of the Bible we lose anything of value, I am 
one of those who believe that the modern concep- 
tion of the Bible is a distinct and definite gain 
to the world, and that we are taking stumbling- 
blocks out of the way of the influence of the 
Bible by admitting that it contains mistakes. 
But of this gain I will speak later on. Just 
now let it suffice to show you that there are 
mistakes. 

Let us take a little bit from the story of the Fall 
of Man — Adam and Eve — the apple — the serpent 



THE GARDEN OF EDEN III 

^-the garden. There is much in this story that 
is suggestive ; it is true to human nature ; when 
I read it I feel it relates my own experience. 
But is it historically and literally true ? Is it 
infallibly true in all its details ? Were there 
ever such things as talking serpents, and trees 
bearing magical fruit ? When I meet with these 
things in other religions I know what they are — 
more or less beautiful myths embodying man's 
early dreams and guesses as to the origin of evil. 
Why should I think that in Genesis I am dealing 
with literal history ? That the serpent should 
have found a place in early Hebrew annals is 
perfectly natural when I remember how widely 
serpent- worship prevails in the East. But we 
get into hopeless conflict with science and common 
sense w^hen we forget that this ancient story 
is a myth and not history. Does any living man 
believe that the whole tribe of serpents crawl 
on their bellies as a punishment for an offence 
committed by one of their number 6000 years 
ago ? Why, we know that the serpent always 
did crawl on his belly long before man appeared 
on the scene. We can prove it, for we can dig 
the serpent out of the pre-x\damite strata and 
see that this was his condition thousands of years 
ere this curse was pronounced. Does any living 
man believe that death first invaded this world 
when Adam sinned ? One must be ignorant 



112 MISTAKES IN THE BIBLE 

of the most elementary facts of science to think 
so. Death was present here in all its fell power 
long previous to Adam ; here are the fossils to 
prove it. And yet people go on telling us that 
if Adam had not sinned man would never have 
died. Does any living man believe that thorns 
and thistles first appeared on the earth in con- 
sequence of the curse ? So far from that part 
of the curse being true — ' thorns also and thistles 
it shall bring forth to thee ' — we know that the 
queen of flowers, the rose in our gardens, comes 
from a thorn, and that instead of the earth 
yielding thistles to man's labour, it does nothing 
of the sort, but brings forth whatever fair flower, 
and healing herb, and life-giving plant we sow 
therein, according to the laws of nature, which 
are the laws of God. 

Then as to the curse on labour. What hardy, 
brave, diligent Englishman feels labour to be a 
curse ? He knows that it is one of his greatest 
blessings and rids him at once of three great 
evils, poverty, vice, and ennui. It is by labour 
we enter into fellowship with God, sharing the 
joys of creation. ' My father worketh hitherto^ 
and I work.'' 

Labour's strong and merry children, 

Comrades of the rising sun, 
Let us sing a song together 

Now our toil is done. 



THE FALL A PARABLE II3 

No desponding, no repining ! 

Leisure must by toil be bought ; 
Never yet was good accomplished 

Without hand and thought. 

Even God's own holy labour 

Framed the air, the stars, the sun, 

Built our earth on deep foundations, 
And the world was won. 

Every part of this fivefold curse, if taken literally, 
is proved to be contrary to fact and experience. 
The author is speaking according to the lights 
and conceptions of his age. But he is mistaken. 
What then ? Is not the story of the Fall still 
true to human nature ? Is it not in this way man 
always wakes up to moral consciousness and 
acquires his sense of right and wrong ? The 
story of Adam is the story of the moral experience 
of every human being. Childhood is the Garden 
of Eden in which we all have wandered, happy, 
innocent, free. But at last comes the day when 
we consciously choose the evil instead of the good, 
and never again can it be with us as it was before ; 
never again can we return to that Eden, our 
unthinking innocence. Yet it is a higher life we 
now begin to live, and the Fall is a giant step in 
human progress. But what if the details are fanci- 
ful and mistaken ? Why, we ought to be thankful 
that on the very first page of the Bible there is 
something which plainly warns us against literalism. 



114 MISTAKES IN THE BIBLE 

In the Book of Leviticus we are told that the 
hare is unclean because it cheweth the cud but 
divideth not the hoof. The fact is, the hare 
does not chew the cud and the writer was in error. 
It is not, however, of the least consequence, 
unless I hold a theory of the Bible which compels 
me to believe that every word is literally true. 

Take two or three figures concerning the 
Israelites and their departure from Egypt. It 
is said that seventy souls — Jacob's family and 
household — went down into Egypt, but at the 
end of 170 years they had increased to three 
millions — an utterly incredible story. And of these 
three millions it is said that there were six hun- 
dred thousand fighting men. Now, consider the 
enormous commissariat difiiculties of marching 
these three millions of people out of Egypt. The 
moving city, twelve miles square, the two hundred 
thousand tents, the one hundred and fifty thousand 
oxen, the two million sheep, the three million 
people, all marched out of Egypt in a single night, 
all supported in the desert for forty years. We 
are quite sure that, to say the least of it, the 
numbers here are woefully inaccurate. 

I pass over many things to notice only a 
command given that on the capture of a certain 
city all the men and all the married women and 
all the little children should be put to death, 
as likewise all the cattle, but that the young 



A REASONABLE VIEW OF THE PENTATEUCH II5 

unmarried women should be saved alive, and 
distributed among the soldiers and the priesthood.^ 
Do you think God commanded that ? Do you 
not think there is a mistake when it says God 
did command it ? 

Let no one say I am attacking the Pentateuch — 
I am simply telling you the truth about it. I am 
directly and indirectly attacking a theory held 
concerning it which the Pentateuch neither asserts, 
implies, nor endorses. And I wish to say further, 
that when we take a rational, natural view of the 
origin of this book, we find nothing which need 
surprise us, nothing which calls for apology. 
Its views of the creation of the world, of the nature 
of God, of the history of man, of the origin of 
evil, are similar to those entertained by other 
peoples in the same relative grade of civilization. 
They are simply the views of God and man and 
the world through which any people in its develop- 
ment naturally passes, but in which no people 
ought to stay. That is the point. When we 
go to the Bible without any theory of miraculous 
inspiration we find what we should expect. It 
is all perfectly natural, and we see in the beginning 
of the Bible that beginning of morality and of 
religion which is in the nature of things, and 
which is the starting-point from which the Bible 
moves upward and onward to something better. 

1 Numbers xxxj. 



Il6 MISTAKES IN THE BIBLE 

But, on the other hand, consider the difficulties 
that harass our every step if we hold to the theory 
that every word is true and miraculously inspired. 
We are compelled perpetually to the disingenuous 
twisting and turning of texts, in order to bring 
Genesis into harmony with the facts of science. 
We are compelled practically to be dishonest 
with ourselves in regard to the science and the 
inspiration of the Pentateuch. We are compelled 
to believe that the inferior morality of the 
Pentateuch — a morality which permitted slavery, 
polygamy, and revenge — is the eternal right and 
wrong of God. We are compelled to perpetually 
apologize for God : to explain to men how it 
could be possible and just for one who is the 
loving, tender Father of men to-day, to have 
ordered the wholesale cruel slaughter of defenceless 
women, innocent children, helpless cattle, reserving 
the young women for the lust of the soldiers. 

It is not something to mourn over but to be 
grateful for that we need no longer attempt these 
excuses and justifications, but can say, in all 
these the Bible is mistaken. Such a confession 
puts ever5^thing right, enables us to use our brains, 
to read the Bible naturally, to see with a new 
interest how the race has been educated, and 
brought on from one standard of conduct and 
belief to another. 

Pass on to the New Testament, and out of many 



THE DISCREPANT GENEALOGIES II7 

instances that might be mentioned, notice only 
two grave mistakes in its pages. Look at the 
genealogies given by Matthew and Luke to prove 
that Jesus was descended from the royal race, 
the house of David. Now notice. Both Matthew 
and Luke tell the story of the miraculous co^icep- 
tion. They both tell us that Jesus was the son 
of Mary without any human father. Yet they 
both take pains to give us the genealogy of Joseph. 
But if Joseph was not the father of Jesus, what 
does his genealogy prove ? It no more proves 
that he was descended from David or Abraham 
than it proves I am. Jesus was claimed to have 
descended from David because a man who was 
not his father descended from David ! Again, 
the two genealogies do not agree. Matthew and 
Luke differ from each other over about forty 
names. In fact, the genealogy given by Luke 
is wholly different from that given by Matthew, 
and the most desperate efforts of divines have 
been unable to effect even the semblance of a' 
reconciliation. Not only does Matthew give 
twenty-six generations between David and 
Joseph when Luke has forty-one, but they trace 
the descent through an entirely different line 
of ancestry. According to Matthew, the father 
of Joseph was named Jacob ; according to Luke, 
Heli. Clearly they cannot both be right, al- 
though many ingenious hypotheses have been 



Il8 MISTAKES IN THE BIBLE 

invented to explain and harmonize these singular 
discrepancies. The most favourite of these 
assumes that one is the genealogy of Joseph 
and the other of Mary — a convenient idea, but 
entirely gratuitous, and positively contradicted 
by tlje language of the text. Either Matthew 
or Luke is mistaken. Yet, what does it matter ? 
Nothing. 

Once more. The Apostles unanimously and 
clearly taught and believed that the end of the 
world was at hand, and would arrive in the life- 
time of the existing generation. On this point 
there appears to have been no difference of 
opinion amongst them. People try to explain 
their words away, but their meaning is so palpable 
that no effort can confuse our perception of it. 
' The time is short' ' The Lord is at hand.' ' The 
end of all things is at hand' ' Little children, it 
is the last time' ' Behold, I shew you a mystery ; 
we shall not all die, hut we shall all he changed.' 
' This we say unto you hy the word of the Lord, 
that we which are alive unto the coming of our Lord, 
shall not prevent them which are asleep' ' For the 
dead in Christ shall rise first, and these which are 
alive and remain shall he caught up together with 
them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.' 
Nothing can obscure or explain away the simple, 
straightforward meaning of all these words. What 
then ? History has shown that Paul and his 



THE SECOND ADVENT ^ II9 

fellow-Apostles were mistaken in their notion 
of what was going to happen. But we can easily 
see how this belief coloured all their teaching. 
The firm and living faith that a few years would 
bring their Lord in his glory, and the fearful 
termination of all earthly things — ' when the 
heavens should he gathered together as a scroll, 
and the elements melt with fervent heat ' — and that 
many among them should be still alive, and should 
witness these awful occurrences with human eyes, 
and should join their glorified Master in heaven 
without passing through the gates of death, 
could not exist in their minds without producing 
not only a profound contempt for all the pomps 
and distinctions of the world, but an utter care- 
lessness for the future interests of mankind ; 
nor without making them indifferent to all 
political questions and to the reform of great 
abuses in social life. What mattered slavery if 
the world was soon to come to an end ? What 
interest could they feel in the Imperial system 
and the reform of government when the King of 
Kings was daily expected to assert his dominion ? 
' If the world and all its mighty and far-stretching 
interests — if the earth and its infinite and varying 
beauties — were indeed to be finally swept away 
in the time and presence of the existing actors in 
the busy scene of life, where was the use of forming 
any new ties of kindred or affection which must 



,120 MISTAKES IN THE BIBLE 

terminate so suddenly and so soon ? Why give 
a moment's thought to the arts which embeUish 
life, the sciences which prolong it,, or the know- 
ledge which enriches and dignifies its course ? 
Marriage, children, wealth, power, philosophy, 
slavery, tyranny — what were they to men who 
knew that ten or twenty years would transplant, 
not only themselves but the whole race of man 
to a world where all would be forgotten ? And 
this conviction teeming with immense and 
dangerous consequences, and held by all the 
Apostles, was, we know, mistaken and unfounded. 
There was scarcely any doctrine which they held 
so undoubtingly, or preached so dogmatically 
as this, and yet they were in total error. '^ 

If, then, they were so misinformed and mistaken 
in a matter so important, what confidence have 
we that they never made a mistake about any 
other question ? 

On the other hand, I aver that it is an immense 
gain to look at the Bible with reasonable eyes, 
and to frankly admit that there are mistakes in 
it. We are no longer under obligations to defend 
what is intellectually, and it may be morally, 
indefensible. We are no longer compelled to 
apologize for, or explain away and harmonize, 
the contradictions of the Bible. The man who 
would be a Christian, but who would like to keep 
"^ Greg's Creed of Christendom. 



INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DIFFICULTIES 121 

his common sense if he may, says ' But must I 
beUeve in talking serpents, and talking asses, 
and the Tower of Babel ? What about the 
conquest of Canaan, and these slaughterings 
commanded by God ? WTiat about the shaking 
dowTi of a city wall at the sound of a number of 
rams' horns blowTi by the people ? or the staying 
of the sun in the heavens until the battle can be 
finished ? What about the genealogies of the 
New Testament ? Must I believe that Jesus 
drowned two thousand swine, or blasted a fig-tree 
with a word ? What about the prophecies of 
the immediate end of the world ? ' I speak of 
these things to indicate the kind of intellectual 
and moral burden that rests upon a man who 
attaches Christianity to the old theory of the Bible. 
All these things have to be defended or explained, 
and they cannot be defended in the court of reason, 
nor explained without a process of twisting plain 
words out of their meaning, which is discreditable 
both to the intellect and to the conscience. It is 
an unspeakable gain to be able to throw off all 
this burden, whijch neither the past nor the 
present has been able to bear, and to accept that 
which is true because it is true, feeling under no 
obhgation to shut our eyes or to stop our thinking. 
We should be glad to know the truth about the 
Bible, and to be free from a theory of its literal, 
historical accuracy, which breaks down on every 



122 MISTAKES IN THE BIBLE 

page of it. It is a great gain that we no longer 
refuse to recognize discrepancies, and no longer 
make miracles the primary evidence of Christ- 
ianity, as was generally done by writers of the 
last century. No one can read Stanley's Lectures 
on the Jewish Church, and feel that he has missed 
anything of moral or spiritual value because the 
miracles have vanished from the pages. You 
may eliminate the miracles from the Gospel 
narrative and leave untouched its religious power. 
We do not weaken the force and inspiration of 
the Bible by admitting its mistakes : that which 
remains — its spiritual insight and sympathy ; 
its record of men's search for God and cry to him ; 
its story of the religious development of a race 
specially endowed with the sense of God ; its 
unique fulfilment of all moral aspiration in Jesus 
Christ, these stand out all the more clearly when 
once we disentangle them from theories, legends, 
events, which in any other history we should 
promptly set aside as of no account. 



VIII 

EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE— GOD 

A GREAT many people have a theory of the 
Bible which puts both them and it into a painful 
position. They think that all its parts are of 
equal value, and that its ideas and doctrines 
are all on the same level of wisdom and authority. 
They read Judges as they read St. John, and 
think it is equally profitable for instruction : 
they suppose that the teaching of Moses about 
God, and man, and morality, is on the same 
level as that of St. Paul, and furnishes an equally 
safe guide for nineteenth century footsteps as 
for the Jews in their desert-wanderings. Yet 
they cannot help seeing that the conduct of 
Abraham and Jacob, Samson and David, and 
many another, would in these days be met with 
the sternest reprobation ; while many of the 
precepts of the Pentateuch, if now proposed as 
the basis of legislation, would be regarded as both 
immoral and inhuman. To square the Pentateuch 



124 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — GOD 

with modern conceptions of theology and morality, 
they have to make the most painful efforts to 
explain away the plain meaning of the ancient 
narrative, by putting a strain upon words they 
will not bear. Disgraceful bits of history are to 
be Understood in a spiritual sense ; awkward 
facts in the lives of Patriarch and Judge are 
allegorized away, and in a sense the poet never 
intended, 'things are not what they seem.' 
Now all this would be got rid of if men once grasped 
the idea that we have in the Bible — teaching, not 
all on one level but on an ascending scale ; history, 
not of one religion but of many religions — or, 
rather, of religion in its various stages of growth 
and development. What we have in the Bible 
is a more vivid and impressive picture than can 
be found sxiywhere else in literature of the evolu- 
tion of religion and morals on a large scale. 
The Books of the Bible range over a period of 
1200 years, and during that long time we see a 
people rising out of low and barbarous conceptions 
of God and morality, advancing by gradual growth 
to such lofty and spiritual conceptions as were 
taught by Jesus. In the earlier stages, therefore, 
we have laws and doctrines which are now set 
aside, and which, while suited to the age in which 
they came to birth, are totally unsuited for us. 

No one recognized this more clearly than Jesus. 
In the. Sermon on the Mount, how often does he 



A PROGRESSIVE ELEMENT IN SCRIPTURE 125 

use the phrase, ' Ye have heard that it was said 
by them of olden time ' — but ' / say unto you^ 
setting aside the old morality for something 
nobler. Once the Pharisees came to him, trying 
to catch and puzzle him with one of the old Mosaic 
regulations about divorce. It was a regulation 
suited for the childhood of man, but which man 
had now outgrown. Christ answered, ' /or the 
hardness of your hearts Moses wrote the precept,'''^ 
that is, because ye were too ignorant, too childish, 
and too low down in the scale for anything else. 
What Moses commanded w^as not absolutely good 
it was only relatively good ; it was as much as 
men then — -in that stage of civilization — were 
able to bear and understand. If we once recognize 
the progressive element in the Bible, we shall 
be relieved of many difficulties about the Bible ; 
and, looking at it with freer and more intelligent 
eyes, shall see it to be a more wonderful book 
than ever, by reason that it is not all of a piece, 
not all of equal value, but follows the natural 
order of grow^th that the human being follows — 
a growth. from infancy to childhood, from child- 
hood to youth, from youth to manhood. But are 
you going to feed the man wdth the pap-boats of 
infancy ? Would you not expect to find a greater 
wisdom at the end than at the beginning of a 
long period of growth ? 

1 Mark X. 5. 



126 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — GOD 

The fact is, in the Bible there is not one standard, 
but many standards. There is a progressive 
theology and a progressive morality throughout. 
In the beginning there are primitive and childish 
views of God, which we cannot now endorse 
without irreverence. 

The earlier writers of the Old Testament 
represent God as walking, talking, having bodily 
form ; wrestling with one patriarch ; eating veal 
and cakes with another ; contending, and for a 
time in vain, with the magic of other gods ; 
smelling the smell of meat on the fire ; getting 
angry ; being jealous ; repenting ; sanctioning 
fraud ; committing cruelty ; and exhibiting 
almost every passion and imperfection of man. 
Many of these conceptions are the simple and 
fitting conceptions of a simple, childish age ; 
but as we advance this passes away ; the thought 
of God becomes slowly purified, ennobled, and 
uplifted ; through Judges, through Psalmists, 
through Prophets, the development goes on, 
until we have the beautiful conceptions which 
we find in the New Testament — i.e., God as Love ; . 
God as Spirit ; God as Light ; God as a Father. 
The twilight is gone, the perfect day is here. 

We think none the worse of astronomy because 
it had its first beginnings in the superstitions of 
astrology ; we value chemistry none the less 
because it arose out of that ignorance and groping 



THE CRUDE BEGINNING I27 

in the dark called alchemy. So the religion we 
profess is none the less elevated and spiritual 
because it had its beginning in much that was 
ignorant and superstitious. The true idea of 
God is gradually disclosed. Man thinks oi God 
first of all as very much like himself, as a magnified 
man who walks in a garden, who comes down from 
the sky to spy out what people are doing, as though 
he did not know ; as having a human form and 
attributes ; as being easily provoked to anger — in 
one word, man's conception is anthropomorphic. 
God is just a magnified man ; not, however, the 
man of the nineteenth century, a magnified 
General Gordon, or David Livingstone, or Dr. 
Arnold, but a magnified man of the early centuries 
— a magnified Caractacus, or a magnified Romulus, 
or a magnified Abraham, with all the defects, 
the passions, and the ignorance of such characters. 
What a long way do we travel from such crude 
conceptions of God to the conceptions we find in 
John and Paul. The distance between the two 
is immense, yet the one passed by a slow process 
of growth into the other. 

I. Look at this first of all as depicted in the 
various names for God we find in the Bible. 
For names are not mere labels or numbers by 
which you may know A from B. Names in all 
primitive ages are descriptive : they tell us what 
a man or a thing is. Man, for instance, means 



128 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — GOD 

■ one who thinks ' ; husband is ' the house-band ' ; 
the earth is that which is ' eared,' the old Saxon 
name for ploughing ; daughter is * the milking- 
maid ' ; father means ' protector ' ; sister, ' one 
who pleases or consoles.' Thus did the old words 
carry with them moral or natural meanings. So 
in the Bible the names given to its heroes are nearly 
always descriptive either of their character or 
their exploits or the hopes aroused by their appear- 
ance.- Look at Abraham ; his name passes 
through three stages, each of which tells us 
something. First he is Ab, the father ; then he 
is Ahram, the lofty father ; then he becomes 
Abraham, the father of multitudes. Jacob is 
the ' supplanter,' who becomes transformed into 
Israel, ' a Prince of God.' David is ' the darling,' 
and so forth. 

Now look only at three of the names for God 
we find in the Bible. 

In the Pentateuch there are two distinct 
accounts of creation, and two distinct sources 
of information blended together, but often contra- 
dicting each other, yet which we can easily unravel, 
by noting that in each case a different name for 
God is employed. In the first account of creation 
given in Genesis i.-ii. 4, God is called Eloah ; 
but in the second account given in Genesis ii. 4, 
to the end of chapter iii, God is called Jehovah. 

I need not pause now to point out the dis- 



THE NAME ' ELOAH ' 129 

crepancies between these two narratives ; I only 
want you to notice that there are two narratives, 
and that we are deaUng here with two sets of 
documents. But in naany places in the Pentateuch 
this difference is to be observed, so that we 
have come to speak of Elohistic and Jehovistic 
documents. 

Now what does the first name for God mean ? 
Eloah simply means ' the strong one.' It comes 
from the root el, the strong, and was man's first 
name for God. It is from the same root which 
expresses in Hebrew the strength of the mighty 
forest bull, the strength of the ancient oak. It 
is the same word as ' Allah,' which, in the religion 
of Islam, has produced a profound sense of the 
presence of God. ' Allah,' God is great, is the 
cry of the Moslem. It is an idea which may lend 
itself to many errors, but it is true and helpful 
as far as it goes. You may find traces of it in 
various Bible names. Thus, Beth-^/ means the 
stones of God, and Veni-el, the face of God ; so 
that we find not only the legendary Adam, but 
Jacob, 2000 years later, speaking of God as 
' the strong one.' It was not a very exalted 
conception of God, but it was a very natural one 
for man in his infancy. That which first produces 
an impression of awe upon his mind is the might 
and majesty of the forces around him — the storms, 
the wind, the lightning, the seasons^ the scorching 



:t3Q EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — GOD 

sun, the blight, the pestilence, the tornado, the 
awful sea, the towering mountains, the rushing 
rivers. Everywhere he sees the evidence of some 
\yondrous energy, some mighty force, which is 
resistless, and against which he can do nothing ; 
and he falls down and worships it as strength. 

But from this true, although inadequate idea, 
we pass on to another — the idea which is embodied 
in the second name — the name revealed to Moses 
— ' I am that I am ' — or Jehovah. Here is a great 
and important advance. Jehovah means not 
strength, but Eternal, that which was, that which 
is. This is the name which expresses to us 
the self-existence, the unchangeable simplicity 
and unity of God which is not to be represented 
in any outward form. 

The strength, the power of God, might be and 
was set forth in all the different shapes of sacred 
stones, sacred tree, and sacred animal. But the 
Eternal is not these. Eternity, whatever it be, 
is something deeper and vaster. It cannot be 
represented by a graven image. It is the 
Unchangeable, the Invisible. It is not a magnified 
man with parts and passions ; it is spiritual ; 
it forbids idolatry. 

I pass over other names which, as their thoughts 
enlarged, the Jews came to give to God — 
Jehovah-Sabaoth— that is, the Eternal — who is 
the leader of the hosts of heaven and the hosts 



THE NAME FATHER I3I 

of earth, the Ruler of principalities, powers, and 
dominions ; and later on, the Holy One. I pass 
over those names of God which we find in the writ- 
ings of the final oracle of the Apostolic age, whose 
title and whose date may be fairly questioned, 
but whose profound insight into these problems 
cannot be denied. St. John has not told us that 
God is a being of three persons, nor that he is a 
being with personality at all. In St. John's 
definition we are told that God is spirit, and 
that God is Light ; but most emphatically and 
repeatedly that God is Love. It is a definition 
which has never been reasserted in any creed ; 
but it is a definition which is worth more to the 
human heart than all the creeds put together. 
I leave all these to notice only the name by 
which Jesus bade us think and speak of God, 
and which he invariably used — the Father. From 
one point of view it may be said that Jesus came 
into the world to give men this new name for God. 
To proclaim a new name was his mission. ' / 
made known unto them thy name.''^ ' Our Father 
which art in heaven : hallowed he thy name.^^ 
The Father — our Father. That is the great name 
of the Supreme, a name as much greater than the 
Strong, or the Eternal, or the Lord of Hosts, as 
he who revealed it is greater than Abraham, Moses, 
or David. The name of God to us is ' Our Father ' ; 

1 John xvii. 26. 2 Matthew vi. 9. 



132 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — GOD 

the love, compassion, far-reaching watchful care of 
a Father is the figure which best brings before us 
the love, compassion, and watchful care of the 
Ruler of the Universe. 

Here, then, in the names used at various stages 
to represent the thought of God, we see a wonder- 
ful growth and development. 

2. Notice the same law of growth leading 
up to the monotheistic idea. We are accustomed 
to think of the Jews as separated from the 
idolatrous nations around them by their worship 
of the one only God, and we quote the first of the 
ten commandments, ' Thou shalt have no other 
gods before me.^ But the ten commandments, 
even if we assign them to Moses, were of late date 
in the history of man, and even they did not 
announce the truth of monotheism — one only 
God, ' Thou shalt have no other gods before 
me.' Then there were other gods, but they were 
not to be Israel's gods ; there were other gods, 
but none of them before Israel's God. Israel's 
God was the first and the greatest of the gods ; 
but for a long time in Bible history there is no 
denial of the reality of other deities. The God 
of the Hebrews was in the first instance the God 
of the Hebrews, not the God of any other people : 
stronger and wiser than other gods ; but in all 
senses a local god, the god of a tribe, and not 
the god of the whole earth. Thus in Exodus 



* THE GOD OF THE HEBREWS ' I33 

we have the passage, * Who is like unto thee, 
Jehovah, among the gods ? ' In the first Book of 
the Kings we read, ' There is no god like thee in 
heaven above or on earth beneath' When Moses, 
by Jehovah's command, repairs to Pharaoh, to 
demand that he let Israel go, he does not represent 
God as the one sole God of the universe, he simply 
represents him as the ' God of the Hebrews.'^ Let 
us stand for a moment with Moses in the presence 
of Pharaoh, and see him holding his magical 
rod in his hand. When Aaron flings down his 
rod and it turns into a serpent, the priests of 
Pharaoh's religion throw down theirs and they 
turn into serpents also. Aaron possesses no 
power which is not common to the other magicians, 
except that the God of Moses and Aaron is a 
greater God than the god of Pharaoh. Moses 
did not doubt the existence and the reality of 
the gods of Egypt. There is no trace of that 
whatever. Until after the time of David, there 
was no question as to the reality of the existence 
of the divinities of the surrounding nations. 
Moloch, Dagon, and Astarte were real gods. 
The only point was that Jehovah, the God of 
Israel, was above all the others, a greater god 
than the rest. That was proved satisfactorily 
to Moses and Aaron when their serpent ate up all 
the other serpents. Their magicians could turn 
their rods into serpents, but only one serpent 



134 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — GOD 

could devour the others. This showed the 
supremacy of the God of Moses. When a king 
went to war, it was not simply a war between two 
peoples and their kings, but it was a war between 
their gods also ; for Dagon on the one side and 
Jehovah on the other, were supposed to fight 
just as much as the Philistine king and the king 
of Israel. Precisely the same is true in Homer's 
Iliad. There the Greeks and Trojans were fighting 
in the plains ; but the air was thick with the gods 
of Olympus, urging on and inspiring the champions, 
guiding the dart of one and the spear of another, 
overthrowing the horses and chariots. We find 
these ideas throughout ancient times, and they 
are as apparent in the early parts of the Bible 
as in the Greek and Roman mythologies. 

All along in the history of the Jews we hear 
of their continual relapse into idolatry, but it was 
not until after David that the idea dawned upon 
them that the gods of the nations round about 
were no gods at all. The God whom Moses serves 
is the God of a family and a tribe — ' the God of 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.' He is not asserted 
to be the only God : the power of rival deities is 
not denied until we get to such writers as Micah 
and Isaiah. Some of the very texts which are 
now quoted to prove a monotheistic belief on 
the part of the Jews, in reality prove just the 
opposite. Jehovah is ' King of Kings ' and 'Lord 



THE CHARACTER OF GOD I35 

of Lords ' — * a great King and above all gods.'* 
The lords and gods over whom he is supreme 
must exist, or such words would mean nothing. 
The conception of the one living and true God 
was a plant of slow and gradual growth in the 
Hebrew mind. As civilization advanced and 
men rose to higher and nobler levels of life, so 
their thoughts of God were purified and enlarged ; 
and in Isaiah and the later prophets we have the 
truth of monotheism as clearly revealed as in the 
Pentateuch it is unknown. 

3. Notice the same law of growth in men's con- 
ceptions of the character of God ; in the develop- 
ment of the moral and spiritual nature of God. 

It is not to be supposed that the childhood of 
the race will have the same thoughts of the 
Supreme Moral Perfection as we cherish who 
live in its manhood. The ideas of gentleness, 
of patience, of universal love, of unswerving 
beneficence, of untiring goodness, are impossible 
to men in a low state of development. They 
think of God only as they can. He is strong, 
but he is vindictive ; he gets his way by 
unscrupulous means ; he has favourites ; he is 
jealous ; he is only partially informed of what 
is going on in the earth ; he is just the imperfect 
Being which man imagines when he is groping 
his way out of darkness into dawn. This is what 
we find God to be in the earlier chapters of Bible 



136 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — GOD 

history, and no one need be shocked to discover 
what is eminently natural in the Bible record 
of man's religious development. It is only because 
of the stupid way in which men will regard all 
the parts of the Bible as of equal value, and speak 
of the God of Adam, and Abraham, and Moses 
as if he were the same as the God of Paul, Peter, 
and John, that it is necessary to point out in 
particular cases how far the earlier conception 
of God falls short of moral perfection. 

Take the morality involved in the story of the 
Fall of man. Take the God who creates this man 
and woman, and puts them into the garden without 
the slightest particle of experience, without know- 
ing that they had an enemy in all the universe, 
and then makes not only their own fate, but the 
fate of the world depend on one ignorant act, 
he himself knowing that the serpent was cunning, 
yet giving them not a hint. Such a thought of 
God is only possible in a rude age. Look at the 
Exodus and see what kind of a God deals with 
Pharaoh and with the children of Israel. He 
declares beforehand to Moses that he is going to 
harden Pharaoh's heart, so that, in spite of 
everything Moses may do, Pharaoh will not 
consent to the departure of the Jews. He takes 
upon himself the responsibility of Pharaoh's 
future conduct. He distinctly endorses lying 
at the outset. He tells Moses to say that they 



IMPERFECT IDEAS OF GOD I37 

want to go three days' journey into the wilderness 
to sacrifice to their God. If they can only get 
three days' start by a trick, all will go well. 
Moses is not to say anything about running away. 
God tells him to deceive Pharaoh and to get his 
consent under false pretences. And for what 
Pharaoh does, and cannot help doing because the 
Lord has hardened his heart, he punishes the whole 
land of Egypt, nien, women, and children. Not only 
that, but he punishes with disease and death all the 
poor innocent cattle throughout the whole realm — 
punishes them for what he has made one man do. 

A little later on we read that God ordered 
the Jewish people, when they were ready to start 
on their journey, to borrow every valuable thing 
they could of their neighbours, and carry it off. 
Thus they are commanded to rob as well as lie. 

Of course, you will say, Moses was mistaken 
when he spoke of these commandments as coming 
from God. He was really speaking in his own 
name, and applying to that critical state of 
affairs the stratagems and the morality natural 
to his age. Most true : but what then becomes 
of the infallibility of the Bible, and the equal 
value of all its parts ? Besides, what we have 
to consider is this — that the Jews saw no 
incongruity in attributing such commandments 
to God ; it fitted in with their conceptions of 
God, and they were not shocked, as we should be, 



138 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE-»-GOD 

by such orders given forth as Divine injunctions. 
Look at the injunction in Exodus xxii. ' Thou 
shalt not suffer a witch to live.'' This command- 
ment given by Moses, in the name of God, has 
resulted in the hanging, burning, stoning, kilhng, 
and torturing, in one way and another, of hundreds 
and thousands of innocent persons. Now we know 
that there is no such thing as witchcraft, and yet 
we are shown God beHeving in it. 

To us, all these are marally degrading concep- 
tions of God, according to which he is not perfectly 
just, true, and good. But they are conceptions 
natural to such a people as the Jews, in their 
then state of civilization ; they could think no 
other. The point is, that they did not stay there, 
and the Bible does not stay there. Always this 
people, with their deep religious instinct, are 
feeling their way to something better ; ' never 
are they satisfied ; the ideal is enlarged, purified, 
uplifted, and their thoughts are widened with 
the process of the suns. Mingled with their 
degrading views of God, there are other views 
of God in the Pentateuch which are grand, 
noble, and subhme, and a great deal that 
the highest and most lovely civilization in any 
•age need not be ashamed of or apologize for. 
But we must discriminate. We must not sup- 
pose that every time the writer says, ' Thus 
saith the Lord,' that the Lord really did speak 



CONTRASTING IDEAS OF GOD I39 

thus ;^ and we must learn to notice the brighter and 
darker thoughts of God contending with each other 
for the pre-eminence, until the brighter prevail, 
so that in the prophets all these degrading views 
of God disappear. The Jewish race has this glory, 
that we see in it the slow but sure development 
of the God-consciousness which is in all men, 
culminating at last in the man Christ Jesus. 
Mark the grovv'th, notice the immense distance 
between such passages as these : — 

I. 'And Noah offered 2. ' Thou desirest not 
hurni-offerings on the altar, sacrifice, else would I give 
And the Lord smelted a it. Thou delightest not in 
sweet savour, and the Lord burnt- offering.' 
said in his heart, L will 
not again curse the ground 
for man's sake.' And — 

Or between these : 

I. * Ye shall offer a 2. ' The sacrifices of 

burnt- offering, a sacrifice God are a broken spirit, a 

made by fire, of a sweet broken a^id a contrite heart, 

savour unto the Lord, thir- God, thou wilt not 

teen bullocks, two rams, despise.' 
and fourteen lambs.' And 

1 No scholar at this time of day would construe such phrases 
as ' Thus saith the Lord,' and ' The word of the Lord came,' as 
implying a supernatural revelation. Not in Palestine only 
but in all Eastern nations it was the custom to attribute any 
specially good impulse directly to a supernatural source. 



140 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — GOD 

Or these : 

I. * The Lord tepented 2. ' The strength of 
him that he had made man.' Israel is not a man that 
And — he should repent.' 

Or these : 

I. ' And the Lord said 2. ' Lord, who shall 
unto Moses, Speak now in abide in thy tabernacle ? 
the ears of the people, and Who shall dwell in thy 
let every man borrow of holy hill 9 He that walketh 
his neighbour, and every uprightly, and worketh 
woman of her neighbour, righteousness, and speak- 
jewels of silver and jewels eth the truth in his heart.' 
of gold. And the Lord 
gave the people favour in 
the sight of the Egyptians. 
And they spoiled the 
Egyptians.' And — 

What totally different conceptions of God 
are here set forth ; what a progress has been made 
in the course of a few centuries from the God of 
Samuel, who ordered the infants and sucklings 
to be cruelly slaughtered, and the God of Jesus, 
who said ' Suffer the little ones to come unto me, 
and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of 
heaven.' Think of the God of Moses, to whom 
the smell of roasting flesh is a sweet savour, 
and the God of Micah, who proclaims, ' What 
doth the Lord require of thee, man, but to do justly. 



THE LINE OF DEVELOPMENT 141 

to love mercy y and to walk humbly with thy God ? ' 
How thankfully we trace the line of develop- 
ment, and how much more rich and full of meaning 
is the Bible when we read it in this light, and see 
God working and waiting through the ages to 
teach men the truth about himself as they were 
able to bear it. The history revealed in the 
Bible is the history of the growing purity and 
lustre with which the thought of God has beamed 
forth on human souls. Patriarchs who were 
possessed with a sense of the unseen ; lawgivers 
who strove according to their light to rule the 
earth by a better order than men had yet known ; 
prophets who heard in stillness and spoke in 
thunder ; psalmists whose words tremble with 
the consciousness of the majesty and mercy of 
God — all had their part in educating the percep- 
tions of the human race, till at last men had 
advanced to the position when they could take 
in the teaching of Christ about a Father in heaven. 
The partial and fallible conceptions of God in 
the earlier parts of the Bible belong to its essence ; 
they illustrate the history of the evolution of the 
idea of God. But from the earliest times there 
was a yearning, a hungering, a looking forward to 
something better ; the dawn slowly broadens 
into day, and we have finally the perfect idea of 
God given to us by Jesus, the Impersonation of 
Divine Grace and Truth. 



IX 

EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE— MAN 

When you catch a ray of light in a prism it 
Ijreaks up into various parts, and the colours of 
the rainbow are seen lying side by side, melting 
into each other. ' The burnished flaming arch * 
that o'erstretches the whole heaven, is perfectly 
set forth in your three-sided strip of glass, no 
larger than a man's finger. A single tiny beam 
of sunshine, caught in this manner, illustrates 
and explains the vast and perfect rainbow spanning 
the sky from north to south. 

In the same way, the life of any single human 
being contains within itself a history in miniature 
of the human race as a whole. The stages in 
the progress of the individual : the ignorance, 
innocence, and helplessness of childhood ; the 
beauty, dash, and enthusiasm of youth ; the 
patience, wisdom, endurance, and power of 
manhood, are a perfect picture of the development 
of mankind. 



MAN BEGINS AT ZERO I43 

The old theology represents man as having been 
created perfect, from which condition he fell 
away. The new theology, truer to the facts of 
nature, and reading the Bible with more 
enlightened eyes, represents man in his first 
appearance on the earth as an infant, ignorant, 
innocent, helpless, and from that point moving 
towards perfection. Man begins where the infant 
begins, at zero, at nothing, and his history is a 
constant progress towards a better state. The 
race has its childhood, its youth, and its manhood ; 
and if I wanted to symbolize these three stages 
of growth in three Bible names, I should select 
Adam, David, and St. Paul. In Adam you have 
the race in its infancy ; in David, its beautiful, 
passionate, wayward youth ; in St. Paul, its wise, 
strong, and disciplined manhood. 

One immense advantage which follows from 
reading the Bible in the same way we read any 
other book is this, that its earlier portions are 
seen to be eminent^ natural and fall in with what 
we know from other quarters about the infancy of 
the human race. The old myth of a perfect moral 
condition and a full-orbed manhood, followed 
by a gigantic fall which brought ruin upon the 
race, is seen to be a later theological conception 
forced upon the narrative. If we take the story 
as it stands, it is all of a piece with what anthro- 
pology has told us about primitive man ; and as 



144 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MAN 

we follow the story in the Bible of man's develop- 
ment, it harmonizes with the record outside its 
pages. 

I. I want you to notice that we have in the 
Bible the story of man's growth in civilization. 

A great many people are alarmed as to the 
conclusions of Mr. Darwin and others on the 
origin of man. But, however far back we may 
trace man's physical nature, from whatever earlier 
forms it may be thought possible to derive the 
bodily frame which we possess, no one can go 
farther back or deeper down than the statement 
in Genesis, ' The Lord God made man out of the 
dust of the earth.'^ It is thought man is humiliated 
by the supposition of his development from some 
lower form of animal life. But he cannot have a 
humbler origin than the dust of the earth. ' The 
first man is of the earth, earthy '^ says the great 
Apostle, and so says the latest voice of science. 

The words ' Adam,'' and ' homo,'' and ' htimanus,^ 
all alike mean ' out of the ground.' The ladder 
on which man climbs to heaven has its first rung 
on the earth. We begin low down in the scale, 
and from that we move away to the intelligent, 
the moral, and the spiritual. 

It is true that on the first page of the Bible 
we have a declaration about man which is one of 
the divinest things ever spoken, ' God made man 

1 Genesis ii. 7. ^ i Cor. xv. 47. 



THE IMAGE OF GOD I45 

in his own image. ^^ There is nothing in all Scrip- 
ture more beautiful, more inspiring, or more 
suggestive than this. It is the secret of all that 
is noble in human nature and in human history. 
But, like other great truths announced in ancient 
times, the world was not ready for it. It was 
a seed which sank into the ground and remained 
hidden there until Christ came and quickened it 
into vitality. We have not yet grasped its full 
meaning ; not yet do we understand all that is 
meant by the image of God ; not yet has human 
nature developed to the full its divine capabilities. 
We have to look for the meaning of this statement, 
not to man as he was first made, but to man as he 
came to the flower of perfect manhood in Jesus 
Christ. It is my faith that the image of God 
was there in man from the beginning ; but it 
was there as the oak is in the acorn, so that if 
you would know what the oak is, you must not 
look at the acorn at all, but at what it becomes 
after centuries of growth. 

Further, this glorious revelation about man soon 
drops out of sight. It is only found in the first 
of the two accounts of creation given in Genesis. 

The second account, beginning at Genesis ii. 4, 
says nothing of man made in God's image ; we 
are on a lower level of inspiration, and listening 
to a narrator who sees things from another point 
of view — the point of view, not of the prophet 
1 Genesis i. 27. j^ 



146 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MAN 

who discerns what this creature, man, is capable 
of, but of the historian who sees what he is. 

And what is he ? Modern science tells us that 
the first man was not at all that perfect, exalted 
moral being depicted in Milton's ' Paradise Lost,' 
but was originally an ignorant, naked savage. 
That was his first state, and that is how he is 
presented to view in Genesis. The life of Adam 
was the life of a South Sea islander in the Pacific. 
At its best it is a life sweet and idle, in a land so 
fruitful that no labour is required for its support, 
and a climate so genial that no provision is 
necessary for shelter. It suits the islanders, 
who are mostly pulp, morally and mentally — 
the human jelly-fish, without muscle or fibre ; 
but you and I would sicken of it in a week, as we 
would sicken of a week with Adam in the garden 
of Eden. As he is painted for us in Genesis, 
Adam was a creature of small intelligence and 
feeble will, having no moral strength, succumbing 
to the first temptation, worshipping a fetish in 
the form of a serpent, as they do in the South Sea 
islands to-day. What is called his fall was his 
waking up to discern for the first time between 
good and evil ; and, so far from a fall, was a giant 
step in human progress. His expulsion from the 
garden to get his bread by the sweat of his brow, 
so tar from a punishment, was a benediction, 
since only by having to battle with nature, and 



PROGRESSIVE CIVILIZATION I47 

endure the stern necessity of hunger, could he 
ever emerge from the ignorance and helplessness 
of his first savage state. 

From that point the Bible shows us man 
advancing from stage to stage of civilization. 
After the first naked, helpless, savage state, 
we are shown man as a hunter, capturing and 
slaying animals, and living largely by the chase. 
' Ninirod was a mighty hunter before the Lord.'^ 
Then, from chasing wild animals, came the 
taming of certain animals for domestic use — sheep 
and goats, oxen and camels. Men from hunters 
became shepherds. We have the two stages or 
two employments in conflict with each other 
in Esau and Jacob. Esau was the hunter, Jacob 
was the shepherd ; and the shepherd represented 
a more advanced stage of civilization than the 
hunter. But the shepherd's was a wandering 
life, without any other house than the moving 
tent, and was not sufficient for man's wants. 
There grew up out of it the arts of agriculture : 
men learned to plant and reap, and we read of 
' seed-time and harvest''^ This represented a still 
more advanced civilization ; and it has been 
suggested that the story of Cain and Abel is 
just a parable of the conflict between the wandering 
shepherd and the settled husbandman, the nomad 
tribes and the agriculturists. 

1 Genesis x. 9. 2 Genesis viii. 22. 



148 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MAN 

We have a hint given us as to the invention of 
ironwork and music by the mythical children of 
the mythical Cain : * Tubal-Cain, a sharpener of 
every instrument of copper and brass ; Jubal, the 
father of all such as handle the harp and pipe.^^ 
Next, people are gathered together in villages and 
towns. We read of ' fenced cities,' and from life 
in towns, we get commerce and merchandise : 
we read of ' Zebulun dwelling at the haven of the 
sea,^^ which was a harbour for ships, and of 
' the Midianitish merchantmen who passed by.^^ 
Society became more and more complex ; man 
advanced, step by step, in the arts of life and in 
the refinements of civilization, according to a 
law of progress which is as clearly seen at work 
in the Bible as it is in all secular history. Nothing 
can be more in accordance with fact and experience 
than the development of man as depicted in the 
Bible ; first the savage, then the hunter, then 
the shepherd, then the agriculturist, then the 
craftsman, then the congregating of people in 
towns, and out of all this the growth of commerce. 
You will also notice, side by side with this develop- 
ment, the growth of the family into the clan 
or tribe, and the growth of the tribe into the 
nation. I do not desire to lay too much stress 
upon this correspondence between the Biblical 
and scientific accounts of the growth of man 

^Genesis iv. 21-22. ^ Genesis -xh-x.. 13. ^(^^^^5/5 xxxvii. 28. 



GROWTH IN INDIVIDUALITY I49 

in civilization, for the Bible is not a primer of 
science ; but at the same time it is interesting and 
instructive to notice that the order of progress 
indicated by the one is the order indicated by 
the other. It makes the Bible of far greater value 
when we see that its story of man is not the story 
of a once perfect being, ruined by a trivial offence, 
but of a being whose course from the first moment 
of breath until now has been of slow but sure 
progress. 

2. Notice that we have in the Bible the story 
of man's growth in Individuality. 

The idea of individuality, the sacredness of 
the individual life, the inestimable preciousness 
of each human soul, the doctrine that every man 
has a right to be himself, and that every man is 
of value to God — this idea scarcely exists in the 
early part of the Bible and has no prominence. 
The absence of such an idea accounts for human 
sacrifices ; it was because Isaac had no right in 
his own life and did not belong to himself, but to 
his father, that he and Abraham saw nothing 
unnatural in his proposed death. 

The absence of such an idea accounts for the 
cheapness in which human life was held, for 
the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites, women 
and children as well as men at arms, for the 
destruction of the families of the men who had 
been convicted of crime, as Korah, Dathan, and 



150 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MAN 

Abiram ; it accounts for slavery and polygamy. 

In all the ancient world this remarkable want 
is apparent, a true idea of the individuality of 
man, an adequate conception of him as an 
independent person, a substantial being in himself, 
whose life was his own and who had natural rights 
of his own. Man always figures as an appendage 
to somebody else — the son to the father, the 
father to the chieftain, the wife to the husband, 
the slave to the master, the subject to the monarch. 
He is the function or circumstance of another. 
In the early civilizations of Greece and Rome, 
as well as Israel, the individual was nothing, 
the family was everything. Society was not a 
collection of individuals, but an aggregation of 
families. The unit of society was not, as it now 
is, the individual man, but the family. So if 
the head of a family was a criminal, his wife, 
children, and slaves, who had no rights apart 
from him, were all supposed to be involved 
in his guilt, and were punished with his punish- 
ment. In a public execution the criminal's 
family was put to death. 

There was, in fact, aU over the world a totally 
different conception of human rights from that 
which now prevails. Thus the law of Lycurgus, 
for the destruction of weakly infants in Sparta at 
their birth, would have been impossible had 
there not been a very different conception of the 



DEFECTIVE IDEAS OF INDIVIDUALITY 151 

rights of the human being in his own hfe from 
that which now exists. With us, the rights of 
man commence at his birth, and an infant an hour 
old is recognized as having a moral and legal 
right of property in his owti life which the whole 
world cannot take away from him. Had that 
been the received idea in the age of Moses, the 
wives and children of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram 
could not have been sacrificed as they were. 
It was an idea too great even for Moses. It is 
an idea so self-evident to us that we can hardly 
conceive of society without it, and we are apt to 
suppose that it must have been equally self- 
evident to any human being, in any age, who had 
the simple exercise of his reason. But all history 
shows, as well as the Bible, that so far from this 
idea having been always obvious to the human 
understanding, it is a plant of slow and gradual 
growth. It is a defective idea of individuality 
we see set forth among the Jews. But we also see 
its purification and development. It was the 
glory of the Prophets that they brought a better 
thought of man to light. 

Never yet in the world's history, before the 
days of Isaiah, had a man been more precious 
than gold I^ Nothing had been so cheap as human 
life. But far away in the distance the prophets 
saw a day, when a man would be a treasure above 

1 Isaiah xiii. 12. 



152 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MAN 

price ; it was their glory that they looked forward 
to a time when the question should be asked, 
* What shall a man profit if he gain the whole 
world and lose his own soul ? '^ 

As the story advances from Moses to the 
later prophets we see the idea of individuality 
growing. Each man is responsible for his own 
deeds only. In the days of Ezekiel it would have 
been impossible to put a man's wife and children 
with him to death for crimes that he alone had 
committed, since that prophet taught ' The soul 
that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not hear 
the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father 
hear the iniquity of the sonJ^ What a long way 
we have travelled from the reckless treatment 
of human beings in the days of Moses, to the 
teaching of Christ about the value of one sheep 
and one lost piece of silver ! Christ saw that 
each human soul was in distinct personal relation 
to God. He saw that God had a thought of 
beauty about each vile sinner ; a care and a 
purpose for him which forbade his being treated 
with contempt, or as of no account. He was a 
child of God, made in God's image, and therefore 
unspeakably precious. 

It is this idea which is the true basis of our 
modern democracy ; it is the vitality of all the 
political movement of the future. No doubt the 

1 Matt. xvi. 26. 2 Ezekiel xviii. 30. 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN 153 

idea of individuality may, and has, run into 
extremes, but it is an idea destined to bear much 
precious fruit. Now this idea came not from 
the Old Testament, where at most it is only a 
prophetic hope, but from the New Testament, 
where it is a living, burning message. Heathenism 
had no such notion of man as man. Judaism 
had it not. The ancient Republics were strangers 
to it, for they were nothing but oligarchies built 
upon slavery. It came with power into the world 
for the first time when it was revealed that it 
was not for the high, not for the philosophical, 
not for the wealthy, not for kings, or nobles, 
or patricians, but that it was for man as man, 
for each soul of man, that Jesus poured out his 
soul unto death. Man, God's child ; God, man's 
heavenly Father ; Christ living and dying to uplift 
the outcast and the beggar — this was the gospel 
of Individuality. It is a gospel which the Bible 
slowly unfolds, until we hear Christ saying, 
possessed as he was with a sense of the unspeakable 
value of man as man, though he be slave or criminal 
' / am come to seek and to save that which was lost.^^ 
The dignity and value of man as man is the 
ruling idea of our nineteenth century civilization. 
It is that which gives life to whatever of good 
there is in Secularism ; it is the secret of what 
vitality there is in Comtism. When Secularism 

1 Matt, xviii. 1 1. 



154 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MAN 

speaks of the rights of man, it is simply translating 
the language of the Bible into its own dialect ; 
and when Comtism magnifies the idea of humanity, 
it but echoes the teaching of Jesus Christ. It 
has been the special cry of the modern Reformer 
that it is not as king, or as peer, or as a star of 
refined life, or even as a cultivated or educated 
person, that man is great, but that he is great 
in himself ; that every man has in him the dignity 
and excellence of human nature, and is an in- 
dependent being having inalienable rights. 
Listen to Shelley : — 

Yon sun. 
Lights it up the great alone ? Yon silver beams, 
Sleep they less sweetly on the cottage thatch 
Than on the dome of kings ? Is mother-earth 
A step-dame to her numerous sons, who earn 
Her unshared gifts with unremitting toil ? 
Yet every heart contains perfection's germ : 
The wisest of the sages of the earth. 
That ever from the store of reason drew 
Science and truth, and virtue's deathless tone, 
Were but a weak and inexperienced boy, 
Proudly sensual, unimpassioned, unimbued 
With pure desire and universal love, 
Compared to that high being of cloudless brain, 
Untainted passion, elevated will 
Which death might alone subdue. 
Him, every slave now dragging through the filth 
Of some corrupted city his sad life. 
Pining with famine, swoln with luxury, 
Blunting the keenness of his spiritual sense 



THE BIBLE AND THE IDEA OF HUMANITY I55 

With narrow schemings and unworthy cares. 
Or madly rushing through all violent crime. 
To move the dead stagnation of his soul, — 
Might imitate and equal. 

Where did the poet get this idea ? Out of 
the Bible, however reluctant he might be to own 
it. It does not exist elsewhere. We know the 
history of this idea, as we know the history of a 
scientific idea, a discovery, or an invention. 
The very men who reject the Bible are indebted 
to the Bible for the most valuable thing they 
have to teach. It is instructive to see how fuU 
the world has become of this idea of humanity 
when once disclosed ; how it exults in it when 
once it is understood. Often it is distorted and 
often exaggerated ; but, however coloured and 
discoloured by human thought, it is a saving idea 
which has taken possession of the w^orld, and 
di\ndes ancient from modern societ}^ by an 
immeasurable gulf. 

But while Christ's doctrine of man has revolu-- 
tionized society, it has done so by the gradual 
influence of an unseen spirit, not by rules and 
regulations. There is, for instance, no express 
prohibition of slavery, either from the lips of 
Jesus or his Apostles. John Wesley said that 
* slavery is the sum of aU \dUainies ' ; but it is 
doubtful whether Paul thought slavery to be a 
particularly dark evil. The Apostles did not see 



156 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MAN 

how far the principles they were teaching led them. 
But the New Testament gave to the world an 
idea of man side by side with which slavery could 
not exist. 

Still more striking is the victory of this idea 
over the ancient sentiment in regard to marriage 
and the relation between the sexes, involving, 
as it did, the degradation of woman. 

Polygamy disappears. Woman is made the 
spiritual equal of man. No prohibition is issued : 
no rule is laid down. But the idea of individuality, 
in the course of time, won its way — the idea that 
every woman, as well as every man, has sacred 
rights — an independent existence, an individu- 
ality of her own, a nature more precious than gold. 

Nor has the development of this idea come to 
a close. Still we do not value men as we should. 
Still we think with contempt of the peasant, 
the slave, the criminal, the negro. Still selfish- 
ness and pride cheat us into the belief that, in 
one way or other, we are superior clay to the 
ignorant, the dull, and the superstitious. Still 
we find it hard to believe that man is made in 
God's image ; but when we do once believe it, 
when the world realizes its full meaning, then 
will come the long looked for golden age, and then 
' up springs Paradise around.' 



X 

EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE— MORALITY 

When the idea of evolution first seized upon 
the world it was thought to ignore, if not to deny, 
the agency of God in creation. If the perfect 
and complete horse did not spring into existence 
in a moment, at the fiat of an Almighty will, 
it was said that the Almighty did not make the 
horse at all. If man came up from lower stages 
of animal existence by successive generations 
of growth, then it could not be true that God 
made man in his own image. Orthodox divines 
could not conceive that God made the horse at 
all, unless he did it in a particular way ; nor that 
he was the Creator of man, unless man was 
called forth instantaneously. They said that 
such a theory of the process of creation did away 
with the Creator. But is it less wonderful and 
less worthy of the wisdom of God that he should 
create slowly and gradually instead of suddenly 
and all at once ? The means, the how of creation 



158 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MORALITY 

implies no opinion one way or the other as to the 
source of creation. Ought God to seem to us 
less or more real and august, because he works 
by the method of evolution, which is in harmony 
with all our works, rather than by another method 
of which we have no analogy in human experience ? 

So people have found it hard to believe that 
God has been the teacher of man, unless he gave 
man the perfect religion and the perfect morality 
at the beginning. They are shocked when they 
hear that it is a very imperfect conception of God 
we have in the Pentateuch and a very imperfect 
moral ideal. When Mr. Matthew Arnold tells 
us that we have in the Old Testament a spiritual 
God, and a spiritual religion, and a lofty morality 
gradually and on an immense scale discovering 
themselves and slowly becoming, and not as in the 
popular view, ready made of precise dimensions, 
many cry out ' Atheist ! ' But where is the 
atheism ? Is God less real and wonderful because 
he teaches men gradually and as they are able to 
bear it, rather than flashing the full light of noon- 
day upon them all at once ? Shall we say in our 
ignorance, unless God taught men by a particular 
method we will not believe he taught them at all ? 
Let us be at once more humble and more scientific. 
Let us study the facts before we frame our theories 
as to his methods. 

Studying the Bible, then, as we study nature. 



MANY MORAL LEVELS 159 

not to make it square with preconceived theories, 
but simply to find out the facts and then let the 
theories grow out of the facts, we learn that man's 
moral instruction is in line with God's methods 
of working in all other directions. The perfect 
form, the perfect morality is not at the beginning, 
but at the end. There is not one only moral 
standard in the Bible, but many standards. 
The morality of Jacob is bn a lower level than the 
morality of Moses, and the morality of Moses is 
far behind that of Isaiah. David has not that 
lofty ideal of conduct we see in Hezekiah, and 
Hezekiah is not to be compared with St. Paul. 
There is growth throughout, and the distance from 
the Ten Commandments to the Beatitudes of 
Jesus is immeasurable. The glory of the Bible 
record is this — not that Genesis is as useful a 
moral guide as the four Gospels, but that 
there is constant progress. The precepts at the 
beginning are faulty, the morality is defective, 
but there is a perception in the minds of the 
successive heroes of Jewish history that something 
better may be attained. All its noble spirits are 
marked by this — that they look forward, that 
they are dissatisfied with things as they are, 
that they see, as in a dream, a fairer social state 
and a nobler morality drawing them on. 

I take it that this is always the work of inspira- 
tion ; not that the inspired man is infallible. 



l60 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MORALITY 

or sees the complete and perfect moral truth, 
but that he rises in moral stature a little above 
the level of his times, and discerns, earlier than 
his fellows, the next stage in moral progress. 
In the Jewish religion and morality there was 
something over and above the actual letter of the 
law ; there was also a principle of progress in the 
system ; an inner spirit and movement ; an 
impulse which tended strictly in one direction. 
The dispensation looked out of itself : it looked 
forward ; and the prophets were always painting 
glowing pictures of a better and brighter day 
which should appear. The belief in a better 
rule of life on earth was the standing prophecy 
of the Jewish religion ; it did not belong as an 
individual gift to particular persons, but dwelt 
like a guiding spirit in the nation, inspiring it 
with an ideal which dwarfed the present state — 
a good in the distance, towards which it was 
advancing. When the Jew sinned he knew he 
had sinned, and when he obeyed the law he knew 
that he was not yet perfect. His vision overlooked 
the immediate present to fix upon a remote horizon 
which was illumined with a mysterious glory, 
and gleamed with a moral beauty and perfection, 
when violence should no more be heard in the 
land, and greed and passion should be so subdued 
that the lion should lie down with the lamb. 
Thus while the Divine, unseen spirit of religion 



DUTY RELATIVE l6l 

made use of an imperfect moral standard — the 
only one for which civilization was then ready — it 
was slowly educating men up to a higher standard ; 
and while God, as it were, accommodated himself 
to the childhood of man and to a defective idea 
of right and wrong, he was at the same time 
eradicating it and preparing the way for some- 
thing better. 

Now in judging the various moralities of the 
Bible, we must remember that all prescribed duties, 
tables of commandments, and rules of conduct are 
relative. They are none of them the absolute 
and perfect morality ; the things commanded or 
forbidden are right or wrong under the circum- 
stances ; they may under one set of circumstances 
be right and under another wrong. It is true 
there are eternal principles of morality, which 
are the same for all ages ; but their interpretation 
varies, and the rules by which they are carried 
out are modified from time to time according 
to the changed conditions of social hfe. Duty 
is relative to knowledge and ability. Those 
savage races in Central Africa, through which 
Mr. Stanley has been making such a perilous 
journey, are not to blame because they do not 
love their enemies, but hate them unto death. 
They know no better. They are to be pitied 
but not blamed. They are in the same condition 
as the Jews when Moses said to them, ' Thou 



l62 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MORALITY 

shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy. '''^ 
The Jews had no knowledge and no faintest 
conception that it was their duty to love all men ; 
and they are not to be blamed for hating their 
enemies, because in their then state of transition 
they knew and could think no other. Forgiveness 
of enemies was a thought impossible in those days 
and therefore not a duty. The thought slowly 
grew. Even so great and noble a teacher as 
Plato knew it not, and commended the Athenians, 
above all the people in Greece, because they had 
manifested to their enemies the Persians ' a pure 
and heartfelt hatred.' That was an Athenian's 
duty in the time of Plato, as it was a Jew's duty 
in the time of Moses. 

Duty then is relative to knowledge : it is also 
relative to ability. What a man cannot do, 
is no sin for him to omit. The command is 
' Bear ye one another^ s burdens ' ;^ but suppose 
a man is a helpless cripple, and suffers daily 
from distressing sickness, how can he fulfil the 
duty of burden-bearing ? Duty is also relative to 
circumstance and opportunity. ' He that provideth 
not for his own family,'' says an Apostle, ' is worse 
than infidel,''^ and no duty is more generally binding 
than this. But when John Rogers went to the 
stake for conscience' sake, he left his family 
unprovided for. Was it his duty to provide so 

1 Matt. V. 43. 2 Qal, vi. 2. ^ \ Tim. v. 8. 



OBSOLETE DUTIES 163 

absolutely for his family, that he must deny his 
conscience in order that he might live to be their 
support ? The relativity of Duty must be borne 
in mind when we judge the morality of the Old 
Testament. 

We need neither be shocked nor surprised 
when we find duties commanded to fulfil which 
would be criminal now. ' Thou shalt not suffer 
a witch to live.'^ The command to stone to death 
unruly and disobedient children, on the simple 
accusation of their parents — such things in these 
days would be cruel, horrible, and impossible. 
In Deuteronomy xiv. 21, we read — ' Ye shall not 
eat of anything that dieth of itself : thou shalt give 
it unto the stranger that is in thy gates that he may 
eat it : or thou may est sell it unto an alien. '^ How 
does such a way of getting rid of bad meat recom- 
mend itself to your conscience ? Precepts like 
these betray a very defective morality. 

Let us take the case of slavery. Slavery is 
inculcated and legislated for in the Pentateuch 
and recognized as moral, and in those days it 
was moral. It was a distinct advance in humanity 
on the old practice ; it was relatively better than 
that which preceded it. Slavery grew out of 
the question — what are we to do with prisoners 
taken captive in war ? At first it was the custom 
to massacre them indiscriminately : every war 

1 Exodus xxii. 18. 



164 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MORALITY 

was a war of extermination. But by and by a 
more humane thought took hold of men ; this 
indiscriminate slaughter of helpless prisoners 
came to be regarded as too shocking, and they were 
made slaves instead. It was a step forward in 
morality and a gain to civilization. 

The same is true of Polygamy, intolerable as 
the idea is to us. It was at the time a gain to 
civilization and an advance in morality. If you 
carefully trace the growth of social life, you will 
find that there are lower stages than Polygamy. 
There was a time when human beings herded 
together promiscuously, and there were no ties 
binding any particular woman to any particular 
man ; there were no permanent families ; there 
was not the shadow of wifehood. But Polygamy 
represents a higher stage of morality : it is a 
recognition of some sort of binding tie between 
men and women, and a new sort of family relation. 
It is man's first step out of barbarism, and, 
relative to his knowledge and circumstances, 
marked a stage of moral progress. We have out- 
grown it, but we can look back upon it as having 
had its place in the evolution of morality. 

Is Jacob then to be blamed because he was a 
Polygamist ? Not at all. Such a conception 
of the family and of the relations of the sexes 
was not wrong for him, and we are foolish to expect 
that on such a question he should be before his 



CHRISTIAN ETHICS 165 

time. But that which was not wrong in the 
Patriarchs would be unspeakably wrong in us. 
The morality which is good for the negro in 
Central Africa is not good for the civilized man. 
Let us turn to the Sermon on the Mount and 
hear Jesus saying : ' Ye have heard that it was 
said to them of old time .... hut I say unto you,'' 
etc.^ This is how the Great Teacher prefaces his 
instruction on five points of niorals and conduct. 
Taking up the questions of murder, adultery, 
oaths, retaliation, and the scope of human love, 
he shows that the ancient rule is not large enough 
for the children of the newest time. Thought, 
feeling, and civilization have advanced, and 
demand a more spiritual morality. The old rule 
was sufficient for the age in which it was uttered, 
and remained sufficient for many a succeeding 
age ; it was as much as men could then take in : 
but man has since made progress, and now 
Jesus proceeds to expound a higher law. In 
another place he says, ' Moses for the hardness of 
your hearts gave you commandments which were 
not good '^ — that is, which were not absolutely 
good. They were good for the age and time and 
circumstances ; but they passed away when men 
reached a higher stage of civilization. The Jews 
under Moses could not have understood the lofty 
spiritual teaching of Jesus ; they needed something 

1 Matt. V. 21. .2 Mark x. 5. 



l66 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MORALITY 

rougher, and on a lower level of thought and 
feeling. But you cannot have the higher stage 
of growth without the lower. Is the Bible, then, 
of less moral value to us because we see in it a 
growing morality ? Not so, but it is no longer of 
equal value in all its parts. If we assert that the 
morality of the Pentateuch belongs to a more 
elementary stage of human life than the morality 
of the Sermon on the Mount, we simply assert 
that the one is less profitable for our instruction 
than the other. And yet the examination of the 
lower stage in the Bible is of value because it 
gives us a profound conception of God as an 
Educator, training with Eternal Patience the 
races of men into ever higher knowledge. 

Notice, as a specimen of his teaching on other 
questions, how Jesus deals with the ancient law 
of Retaliation — Lex Talionis. The Mosaic law 
ran — ' // a man cause a blemish to his neighbour, 
as he hath done, so shall it be done to him, breach 
for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.^^ And again, 
with awful, horrible minuteness, ' Life for life, eye 
for eye, tooth for tooth, burning for burning, wound 
for wound, stripe for stripe.''^ Now this is a rude 
and early conception of justice, which we find 
in all primitive races. Man's first notion of 
justice is, like for like. To retaliate in the same 
manner is the only way to punish the criminal ; 

1 Lev. xxiv. 20. . 2 Exodus xxi. 24-25. 



LEX TALIONIS 167 

and revenge, according to a recognized law, is 
an advance upon a state of society in which 
criminals go unpunished. In this way we see 
man's sense of justice struggling into shape. 
But it was very imperfect, and gave rise to many 
evils. You have heard of the vendetta which 
flourished so long in Eastern Empires and still 
is found in Corsica, the duty of the living relatives 
of a man who has been murdered, or even killed by 
accident, to revenge the death of the murdered 
one. Life for life cries the wild justice of revenge. 

A little advance is made upon this in the 
Mosaic law, by the provision of Cities of Refuge 
for men who had killed by accident, or as we should 
say in case of justifiable homicide. If they reached 
the City of Refuge before they were caught they 
could not be put to death ; yet if they were 
caught before they reached the city, the pursuers 
were justified in killing them. It was still very 
barbarous ; but it was the effort to climb a little 
higher than the first naked, unconditional precept 
of ' eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' 

When we have advanced to the book of Proverbs 
we have reached higher ground. ' // thine enemy 
he hungry, give him bread to eat ; and if he he 
thirsty, give him water to drink : for thou shalt 
heap coals of fire upon his head, and the Lord 
shall reward thee.^^ 

1 Prov. XXV. 21-2. 



l68 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MORALITY 

The writer here is a whole world ahead of Moses, 
and has a totally different conception of duty. 

Next, listen to Jesus after he has quoted the 
Mosaic precept — ' But I say unto you, Love your 
enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to 
them that hate you, and pray for them which 
despite fully use you.^^ 

Humanity has at last come to its flower ; the 
moral ideal is wonderfully exalted ; love, mercy, 
and tenderness have taken the place of revenge. 
Popular critics of the morality of the Old Testa- 
ment apply the coarsest possible argument to 
this subject. They think it enough to point to 
a rude penal law, such as the law of retaliation, 
to the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites, 
to the cursing Psalms, to the treachery of Jacob, 
to the drunkenness of Noah, to the adultery of 
David, and it at once follows that this is the 
morality of the Bible. But this is to judge the 
sculptor from the broken fragments of stone. 

It is not the morality of the Bible unless it is 
the morality to which the Bible leads up in the 
end. The morality is to be tested by what it 
became in Jesus, not by its previous stages of 
growth. The morality which permitted retaliation 
and polygamy was the morality of an inferior 
and subordinate stage of human existence, and 
this stage passed from use and sight as the higher 
1 Matt. V. 44. 



A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 169 

emerged into view. The popular critic adheres to 
a class of commands which were stepping-stones to 
higher things ; but the morality of the Bible is 
in what it became in its finest examples, and not 
in the preliminary stages. God in Old Testament 
history was working towards a spiritual religion 
and a spiritual morality. The Mosaic law was 
just as far as an unenlightened people could go ; 
it was, indeed, a little in advance of the times ; 
yet when you assert that it was imperfect you 
state a fact. But there were germs of something 
nobler within it, there was an inner design which 
you must also consider, a tendency, a principle 
of growth, by which the nation was brought up 
inch by inch, to higher levels of moral feeling 
and perception. There was the consciousness 
with the nobler spirits of Judaism that life must 
be urged on to conformity with a fairer vision. 
Look at David. Nothing that you can say of the 
murder of Uriah and the connexion with Bath- 
sheba can be too severe. You condemn his 
conduct with indignation, and you are right, 
but so does the Bible. When Nathan, the prophet, 
said, ' Thou art the man' all the avenging furies 
of David's conscience began to sting. But you 
will notice that this sort of crime on the part 
of an Eastern prince was quite common, and up 
to this time had been very leniently treated. 
Never before had a prophet dared to beard 



170 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MORALITY 

such a prince, and say, ' Thou art the man.'' It 
is a landmark in the progress of moraUty. And 
David is different from other oriental kings in 
this, that he knows that he has done wrong. 
He had reached a higher conception of duty than 
others, and therefore he could not sin and be easy 
about it. It was not public opinion which 
tormented him, for public opinion in his age 
would have easily excused his offence ; it was 
conscience rising above the age which toimented 
him, which compelled him to subterfuges and 
duplicities, and at length wrung from him the cry, 
' Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, God.'' Such 
a thing as this could scarcely have happened 
in any other country and court at that time, 
or in many a succeeding age. 

It marks a great character, to take a higher tone 
than that of his time or nation ; and although 
David fell, with him it was a fall, and not the 
ordinary level of his life, nor the path which he 
recognized as the right one. The same dark 
deeds might have been done by a Pharaoh or a 
Herod, and they would have been forgotten long 
ago : little noticed by the subjects, never reproved- 
by a prophet, and causing not a moment's uneasi- 
ness to the monarch. But to see an Eastern 
autocrat miserable, tormented, punished, repent- 
ing, because of an act which any fellow- sovereign 
would have dismissed as a clever trick, this was 



MORAL VALUE OF THE BIBLE I7I 

altogether strange, and showed a man rising in a 
moral sense to a higher level than the accepted 
level of his age ; and so helping fonvard. as by a 
prophetic spirit, the moral standard of mankmd. 
In the Bible, then, we have a growmg concep- 
tion of morality. We see the idea m its rude 
beginnings, only half articulate, emerging with 
many a struggle, from the lieshly and the earthy ; 
we see it in various stages of growth ; we see it in 
its glorious and unique consummation in Jesus 
Christ. So it does not matter how many mistakes 
we find out in the Bible, nor does the imperfection 
of its heroes take away from its significance. 
For so long as the world wants to know what 
morality is, and how to get it, and how men rose 
out of an inferior morality and reached the high 
level of Paul and John, the Bible wiU hold its own. 
The idea is in other ancient books ; but in the 
Bible it is plainer and easier to come at than am'- 
where else, and incomparabh' more impressive. 
The Bible has the genius for morality, for righteous- 
ness, for truth, justice, and love, and for making 
us feel what they are, and giving us an enthusiasm 
for them. It is true the ideal of morality we 
cherish now would have been impossible in the 
infancy of the human race. Xo one would have 
understood it. Had it been revealed it would 
have done more harm than good. But from the 
infancv of the race, we are shown the law of 



172 EVOLUTION IN THE BIBLE — MORALITY 

progress at work ; and along that line of moral 
development man steadily advances — sometimes, 
indeed, turning back, but always repenting with 
tears and shame and new resolution — slowly led 
on by God from one moral conquest and one moral 
ideal to another, until the great Son of Man 
appears with a conception so lofty, so beautiful, 
so spiritual, so perfect, that the world still fails 
of its achievement. But we have a prophetic 
hope in our hearts that we shall not always fail ; 
and as once again the Christmas bells begin their 
jo5rful chime, we renew our effort and cry : 

Ring out wild bells to the \\ild sky. 

Ring out old shapes of foul desire ; 

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold ; 

Ring out the thousand years of old, 
Ring in the thousand 3^ears of peace. 

Ring in the vaUant man and free. 
The larger heart, the kindher hand ; 
Ring out the darkness of the land. 

Ring in the Christ that is to be. 



XI 

THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE 

John Stuart Mill speaks with a touch of 
scorn of those who fancy the Bible is all one 
book. For, while it is a matter of convenience 
to have the writings of Isaiah, Solomon, Paul, 
and John bound up in the same covers, the 
arrangement is not without grave disadvantages. 
It has led people to forget that these books were 
written by very different authors at very different 
times, and representing very different periods 
of enlightenment, and different stages of morality 
and religion. It is only as we remember that 
the Bible is not one book of equal value in all its 
parts, but a library consisting of the remnants 
of two great literatures — the Jewish and the 
early Christian — that we have found the true 
key to its interpretation. 

And yet, as the author of Natural Religion 
has pointed out, while it is a great mistake to 
think that the Bible is all one book, it is perhaps 



174 THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE 

a still greater mistake to think that it is not one 
book, or that it has no unity. From first to last, in 
poem and parable, in history and drama, in 
prophecy and in precept, it is concerned with 
the same things. 

Its various books are linked together by the 
presence of a few leading ideas of immense im- 
portance to the welfare of mankind. 

In some of the books these ideas are only in 
germ, or in an early stage of growth, while in 
others we see thern in their full development. 
* Certain large matters are always in question, 
and the action moves forward with a slow evolu- 
tion, like the denouement of a play, through a 
thousand years of history.' The later books are, 
in a very true sense, the fulfilment of the earlier, 
as the noonday is the fulfilment of the dawn, 
and the man is the fulfilment of the child. If 
we take up the Shakespearean fancy and say 
that the life of the individual passes through 
various stages, we may notice how widely different 
is the lover making a sonnet to his mistress' 
eyebrow, from the infant muling and puking 
in his nurse's arms ; or the Justice of the Peace, 
full of wise saws and modern instances, from the 
whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining 
morning face. Yet the various stages, so widely 
different from each other, are bound together 
in a very real unity and make one life. So it is 



THE UNITY OF THE BIBLE I75 

that there is a unity in every national Uterature, 
notwithstanding the distance between its first 
early ballads and its latest and ripest authors. 
In like manner there is an unmistakable unity 
in the Bible which makes of its various parts 
a living whole. 

From one point of view it is true that there is 
no such thing as the religion of the Bible, but 
that there are many religions in the Bible. Yet 
it is a mistake to think that there is not one religion 
in the Bible, although it is nowhere systematized 
or drawn out into the articles of a creed. We have 
in the Bible the record of man's continual search 
for God, that search taking on ever new and 
higher forms, and advancing along one definite 
line of growth and progress. Only when we speak 
of the religion of the Bible, we are bound to think 
of it, not in its crude and early stages, but what 
it was aiming at and became in its last and finest 
examples. The end and not the beginning is the 
test of Bible religion : what it is in the beautiful 
flower, and not what it is in the rough, hard, 
unattractive seed. 

But the rehgion of the Bible, what it is the Bible 
is after, is very generally misconceived. Many 
people think that the religion of the Bible is the 
religion of heaven and hell, and that it is a book 
which teaches chiefly the littleness and worthless- 
ness of this life and the greatness of the life to 



176 THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE 

come — only valuable because it shows us how 
we may, after we have done with life on earth, 
escape the pains of hell and secure the bliss of 
heaven. Nothing could be a more grotesque 
caricature. In the Old Testament scarcely any- 
thing is said about a future state at all. It 
does not appear that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob 
had any conception of the immortality of the soul, 
or of life continued after death in another world. 
Moses is silent about it ; Samuel never refers 
to it ; and even in the prophets of later times 
there are no clear declarations of a future state. 
It was not until the return from captivity in 
Babylon, where th€ Jews had come in contact 
with the disciples of Zoroaster, that the thoughts 
of heaven and hell began to take hold upon their 
minds. Even then, such laboured pictures of 
the state of the dead, and the rewards and punish- 
ments meted out to them, as we find in Homer, 
Plato, Virgil, and Dante are entirely absent 
from Jewish literature. Not that the belief in 
rewards and punishments is wanting, but that 
men are rewarded and punished here and now. 
It is this present life with which patriarchs and 
prophets are concerned : how to live in peace 
and prosperity ; how to get God's will done on 
earth. It is not until we reach the New Testament 
that the thought of a future life becomes part 
of the teaching of religion, although it never 



OLD TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY I77 

assumes the prominence with Paul and John 
that it has done since with their successors. They 
do not dwell upon it as a motive of conduct ; 
the basis of their preaching is not * Flee from the 
wrath to come.'' We find no elaborate descriptions 
of the future state. A few simple affirmations 
about it suffice the Apostles. The Bible is not a 
book about the state of the dead, but about 
the conduct of the living. 

Or, take the Christology of the Old Testament, 
which is supposed to run through its various 
parts and unite them to the New Testament, 
welding the whole into one book. If we find 
distinct prophecies of Christ in Genesis and in 
the succeeding books which are all fulfilled in 
Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ-idea constantly 
appearing through a thousand years of literary 
effort, then undoubtedly these books have the 
unity which comes from being linked together 
by a golden thread of Messianic prediction. 
That these books are linked together by common 
ideas I as firmly believe as I firmly disbelieve 
their Christology. Manifestly, it is more and 
more clearly seen that these predictions of Christ 
were never in the minds of the writers at all, 
but are an afterthought ; and that men have found 
them in the Old Testament because they have first 
of all carried them there. Coming to these ancient 
writings with their minds filled with the thought 



178 THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE 

of Christ, they have seized upon passages which 
they could apply to their Master, and have 
concluded that this, of course, was their original 
application. ' The words of a genius, such as 
Shakespeare, have an ever-germinant significance, 
and constantly find new applications in modes 
of human life which Shakespeare could by no 
means have imagined.' Many ancient words 
which first had only a local bearing are now seen 
to have a secondary and world-wide bearing. 
But it was simply the local meaning which was 
present to the mind of the writer, and their 
wider prophetic meaning is given to them after 
the events of which it is supposed they speak. 
The words of Jacob on his death-bed, ' The sceptre 
shall not depart from Judah until Shiloh come, 
and to him shall the gathering of the people be,^^ 
are often quoted as a miraculous instance of 
prediction uttered 2000 years before the Christian 
era. But the Messianic idea had not yet risen' 
among the Jews : it was an idea of much later 
birth than Jacob ; and if, as I think probable, the 
Pentateuch was not given to the world in its 
present shape until 450 years B.C., how can we 
be sure that we have here the very words of Jacob, 
and not some gloss of the later editor to whom 
the Messianic idea was famihar ? But, setting 
that consideration aside, let us ask, Have we here 

1 Genesis xlix. 10, 



MISTAKEN MESSIANIC IDEALS I79 

a translation on which we can rely ? The fact is, 
this is one of those difficult and obscure passages 
of the Old Testament about which no two scholars 
seem agreed. The Revised Version gives three 
alternative readings in the margin, while other 
authorities still further enlarge the number. 
It would seem that the right rendering of the 
passage is as follows : ' The sceptre shall not 
depart from Judah, so long as the people resort 
to Shiloh (the national sanctuary before Jerusalem); 
and the nations shall obey him J To fasten on these 
words a Christological meaning is the desperate 
resort of theologians, who must find in the Old 
Testament, willy nilly, texts to support their 
preconceived doctrines. 

Or, take the apphcation of the well-known 
chapter, Isaiah liii., to Christ. We can aU see 
how marvellously it answers to the character, 
suffering, and work of the Son of Man ; nor are 
we wrong in thus transferring it to our Master. 
But it is another question whether this was its 
original historical scope. The subject of this 
chapter is some martyred servant of God, recog- 
nizable by the Jewish exile in allusions here made 
to him, but who this man of sorrows was, whether 
Hezekiah, Josiah, the writer himself, or Israel as a 
whole, we cannot say. But we have no reason to 
think the application we make of these touching 
verses to Christ was at all intended by the prophet. 



l8o THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE' 

His words were larger than he knew. There is a 
well-known passage in Plato's Republic, descriptive 
of the career which would be necessary to prove 
a love of virtue for its own sake, and showing 
such a startling resemblance to the general outlines 
of the life and death of Christ that it is just 
as impossible for a Christian in reading it to keep 
such appHcation out of view as it is in reading the 
chapter from Isaiah.^ Both these voices from 
the past are in a very true sense prophecies of 
Christ ; that is, they show an inspired idea of 
what perfect purity, love, and devotion must 
undergo in a world of sin. But if the one writer 
is to be credited with consciously predicting 
the historical Christ, there is no reason why we 
should deny this to the other. 

The fact is the Christology of the Old Testament 
is altogether fanciful ; and exists only in the 
minds of those who are committed to a certain 
theology. What can be more absurd than the 
application of that noble love-poem, the Song of 
Songs, to Christ and his Church ! It is the travesty 
of interpretation. According to this method of 
treating the Bible men have caught at any 
isolated expressions which, by ignoring the context, 
could be forced into a Messianic allusion ; and 

1 ' In such a situation the just man will be scourged, racked, 
fettered, will have his eyes burnt out, and at last, after suffering 
every kind of torture, will be crucified.' — Plato's Republic, 
IL 362. 



SEVEN LEADING IDEAS l8l 

by the same method, the Bible may be made to 
predict anything — the career of Napoleon the 
great, or the downfall of Napoleon the little. 
And indeed there are prophet-mongers who find 
all about the Napoleons in the Bible. Let us 
leave this unprofitable method of interpretation 
for something more sober and soHd. 

The leading ideas which give unity to the Bible, 
which appear more or less clearly in all the separate 
books and bind them into a great whole, and which, 
in the main and generally, may be called the 
ReHgion of the Bible, are as follows : — 

1. The Consciousness of God. 

2. The Providential government of the world. 

3. Man's moral freedom and responsibility. 

4. Communion with the Divine. 

5. Righteousness the secret of happiness. 

6. Sacrifice, passing through rite and symbol 

to spirit and hfe, the cross of Christ 
standing for its highest manifestation 
— the sacrifice of self to humanity, of 
ease to duty, of hfe to truth. 

7. The world's progress towards an ever- 

brightening future. 
These do not exhaust the fist ; but they are 
the ideas which stand out wdth prominence from 
first to last. In addition there are two great ideas 
peculiar to the New Testament which must not 
be overlooked. 



l82 THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE 

1. Love the motive power of the perfect 

Christian Hfe. 

2. The future state and the ImmortaUty 

of the soul. 

There is no time to dwell upon each of these 
features of the Religion of the Bible. You will 
observe generally two things (a) That they are 
not dogmatic and theological ideas, but practical, 
moral, and spiritual ; and (b) that they are not 
truths about which men and churches dispute, 
but about which all Christian people are agreed. 
Notice in particular two of these great leading 
ideas. 

First, the Consciousness of God. From the 
' Psalm of Creation ' with which the Bible opens 
to the glorious dreams and visions of the 
Apocalypse, one thing is unmistakable — man's 
sense of relation to and dependence on God. 
We see the thought of God working itself clear 
from superstition, narrowness, and partiaUty, 
to such inspiring declarations as ' God is Love,' 
' God is Light,' ' God is Spirit.' We see man 
for ever feeUng after God if haply he may find 
him ; we see and are made to feel and share the 
irrepressible craving of the soul after a perfection 
above us, towards which the struggUng ages urge 
the world a little nearer. It was the glory of the 
Patriarchs that their hearts vibrated to the 
thought of God. With all their faults, weaknesses, 



THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD 183 

and immoralities, they had a conception of God 
higher than that of their age ; they Hved their 
lives in the presence of the Unseen ; God was 
not to them, as to the people round about, an 
object of blind and pusillanimous terror. The 
God of Abraham is a friend, not needing to be 
appeased by human sacrifice — a dark and baneful 
usage Abraham is taught to abandon. How 
does psalm and prophecy throb with the idea 
of God ! ' As the hart panteth after the water 
brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, God.''^ ' The 
Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want.^^ ' Thou 
wilt shew me the path of life : in thy presence is 
fulness of joy for evermore.''^ ' Seek ye the Lord 
while he may he found ; call ye upon him while 
he is near.^^ And so it goes on from page to page 
and from book to book, until we have that unique 
consciousness of God which we find in Jesus 
Christ — that union of man with God which he 
expresses in the words ' / and my Father are one ' ;^ 
so that it was God thinking through his thought, 
and God loving through his love ; that sense of 
oneness with God which made loneliness impossible 
even under the kiss of Judas and the curse of 
Peter. The whole Bible is vivid with the conscious- 
ness of God. The conception goes through many 
changes before the fullness of the truth about 

1 Psa/m xlii. I. ^ Psalm -xxx^. \. ^ Psalm xvi. 11. 

* Isaiah Iv. 6. ^ John x. 30. 



184 THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE 

God can be reached, but the sense is always there. 
Ten thousand variations are played on the one 
theme ; but the theme is heard throughout, 

* God is the strength of my heart and my portion 
for ever.^^ 

It is this, first of all, makes the Bible of eternal 
value — it has the sense of God ; it comes home 
everywhere to the seeking heart of man, moved 
as it too is by the sense of God. I know we are 
told that this is no longer true and that man has 
outgrown the sense, and the thought, and the 
need of God. But its mere assertion does not 
make it true. There are men among us in whom 
the sense of God is blunted and indistinct — and 
I know that some of these are disinterested and 
enthusiastic seekers after truth. But they repre- 
sent only a passing phase of life, a back current 
that interferes not with the flow of the mighty 
stream. You tell me of the great names of 
agnostics and others who know nothing of God. 
Still, if names are to be weighed against names, 
where shall we find three of greater significance 
than Darwin, Carlyle, and Tennyson ? If the 
nineteenth century has any intellectual giants 
at all, any prophets of truth and wisdom, these 
are among the first. ' No man,' said Darwin, 

* can stand in the tropic forests without feeling 
that they are temples filled with the varied 

1 Psalm Ixxiii. 26. 



THE IDEA OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 185 

productions of the God of nature, and that there 
is more in man than the breath of his body.' 
Listen to Carlyle : ' This fair universe, even in 
the meanest province, is in very deed the star- 
domed city of God. Through every star, through 
every grass blade, the glory of a present God 
still beams.' And Tennyson, in yet more beautiful 
language, sings — 

The sun, the moon, the stars, the sea, the hills, the plains, — 
Are not these, O soul, the vision of him who reigns ? 
Speak to him thou, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet, 
Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. 

Secondly, notice how the idea of righteousness 
runs through the Bible, joining all its parts 
together as by the links of a mighty chain. ' Do 
justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy 
God,''^ is its great practical instruction. ' The 
Lord loveth the thing that is right. ^^ ' / will wash 
mine hands in innocency ; so will I compass thine 
altar, Lord.'''^ The religion of Abraham is a 
religion, as King Abimelech says, of ' integrity 
of heart and innocency of hands. ''^ Moses is not 
a theological teacher ; he is a political leader 
and a moral reformer. The ten commandments 
formulated with authentic voice and for ever 
that moral order and right are paramount. The 
great souls of Greece and Rome were not wanting 

1 Micah vi. 8. 2 Psalm xxxvii. 28. 3 Psalm xxvi. 6. 
* Genesis xx. 5. 



l86 THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE 

in noble conceptions of duty ; yet, as it has been 
finely said, ' No Roman legislator inscribed at 
the head of his statute the sublime demand, " Be 
ye holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.^^ '^ 
Immoralities are denounced both in Athens and 
in Rome, but there is no one to write the fifty- 
first Psalm. Plato speaks as lofty words about 
righteousness as Isaiah, but they find no echo in 
the hearts of the people. It was the glory of 
Israel that the nation as a whole adopted the 
teaching of the prophets as its standard. This 
people, with a thousand backslidings, had yet the 
intuition and the genius for righteousness. ' It is 
joy to the just to do judgment, ^^ was a saying, not 
for exalted philosophers, but for common life, 
heard every Sabbath day in every village 
synagogue. Whenever a prophet lifts up his voice, 
this is the burden of his cry, ' Cease to do evil ; 
learn to do well \ ;^ and although the Jews in the 
early stages of their religious development had 
learned many valuable things from those picture 
lessons, the rites and ceremonies which Moses 
had instituted, yet what streams of fiery contempt 
the prophets poured upon them when it came to 
be thought that they, rather than justice and 
mercy, were the true sacrifice of God ? All 
history is looked at in the light of moral right 
and order. We are shown the great unrighteous 

'^Leviticus xix. 2. ^Proverbs xxi. 15. ^Isaiah i. 16. 



ALL IS MORAL 187 

kingdoms of the ancient world tottering to their 
fall because of their tyrannies, cruelties, and 
wickedness ; we are shown how doomsday comes 
at last to every iniquity under the sun, how all 
things are moral, and how there is a trend and a 
steady bias in nature and in human history 
making for righteousness. 

This imperishable feature of the Bible, now 
showing clear, and now for , awhile clouded, 
unites its various authors and books in one 
glory and grandeur. The sense of righteousness, 
manifesting itself at first very imperfectly, grows 
with the nation's growth until it receives its 
consummation in Christ, who bears in his own 
person and teaching immortal testimony to the 
truth that well-doing is the beginning and the 
end of all religion, and the secret of joy and peace. 
' Not every one that saith unto me, Lord^ Lord, 
shall enter into the kingdom of heaven ; hut he that 
doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. ^^ 
All is moral. This is the gate of even the highest 
mysteries and the beatific vision itself, ' Blessed 
are the pure in heart ; for they shall see God.'^ To 
hunger and thirst after righteousness is the only 
path of blessedness. 

These ideas of God and Righteousness are the 
distinctive ideas of the religion of the Bible, as 
they are the unifying ideas of its separate parts. 

^Matthew vii. 21. ^Matthew v. 8. 



l88 THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE 

The great value of the Bible is to animate and 
fortify faith in God and Righteousness, and to 
quicken within us the consciousness of their reality. 
For in the Bible they are vivid and intense, so 
that no one can miss them nor what they mean. 
We trace on its pages their growth ; and in our 
best moods we find ourselves responsive to them, 
because they were spoken, not only in the olden 
time by holy men, but are whispered in our own 
ears by the spirit of the living God. 



XII 



WHAT IS LEFT APART FROM MYTH AND 
MIRACLE ? 

In the first of these lectures I noticed that our 
own Bible has many features in common with 
the other great Bibles of the world. Our Bible 
does not stand alone in its moral precepts, and 
it has no monopoly of the great ideas of religion — 
God, conscience, duty, sacrifice, prayer, a future 
life. Neither are its miraculous stories peculiar 
to itself, nor its picturesque myths. The sacred 
books of Buddhists and Brahmins have their 
marvellous tales of the dead brought back to life, 
of sight restored to the blind, of incarnations and 
virgin mothers, of angelic appearances, visions 
and voices, magical fish with money in their 
mouths, talking serpents and asses, bread from 
heaven and water from rocks. Our widened 
knowledge of the races, religions, and literatures 
of the world shows us that such stories as these 
always arise in certain stages of civilization. 



igo APART FROM MYTH AND MIRACLE 

The mind of man, ignorant of science, not yet 
trained to reason rightly or to observe accurately, 
was on the look out for the marvellous, and gave 
to every startling or unusual event a supernatural 
explanation. Under certain circumstances, wher- 
ever men are found, there is, as Shakespeare says — 

No natural exhalation in the sky, 

No scope of nature, no distempered day. 

No common wind, no customed event, 

But they will pluck away his natural cause, 

And call them meteors, prodigies and signs, 

Abortions, presages, and tongues of heaven. 

There is no imposture in all this. For want 
of better knowledge it did not seem unlikely that 
the thunder should be the angry voices of the gods, 
or that an eclipse should be caused by a great 
dragon trying to devour the sun, or that the ticking 
of an insect in the woodwork, heard only in the 
stillness of the night, should be the sign of quickly 
coming death. But as knowledge grows from 
more to more, it is seen that all these things 
are capable of natural explanation, and happen 
according to well-known laws ; the margin of the 
marvellous and miraculous is gradually reduced. 
So many strange things have been found at last 
to have perfectly simple and natural causes, 
that the conviction is forced upon us, all things 
that happen or have happened will be thus 
explained when once we apply the key of know- 
ledge. We see now that miracles do not happen. 



BIBLE-TRUTH INDEPENDENT OF MIRACLE I9I 

A thousand wonderful things, which years ago 
would have been accounted for by miraculous 
stories, are now accounted for by the regular 
operations of nature. 

The first answer of many people to the question, 
How much will be left of the Bible when myth 
and miracle are taken out ? would be. Very little. 
Myth and miracle have seemed to them so very 
important and to involve such large doctrinal 
conclusions, that a Bible from which they were 
left out must, they think, be very shrivelled in 
size and shorn of half its teaching. On the 
contrary, were the miraculous entirely blotted 
out of the Bible, you would not have reduced 
its volume by one-tenth, nor its moral and spiritual 
teaching in the smallest degree whatever. The 
force of the ten commandments remains, whether 
you believe or disbelieve that they were written 
by the actual finger of God on two tables of stone. 
It is still wrong to steal and murder, although the 
thunders of Sinai be resolved into a myth ; we 
know that God still says, ' Thou shalt not commit 
adultery,'' although the granite crags of the desert 
never burned with fire. God is still the righteous 
ruler of men, although Elijah never called down 
flames from heaven to consume his sacrifice ; 
and the Beatitudes are robbed of nothing of their 
beauty because Jesus never drove a herd of swine 
into the sea. We can no longer believe that 



192 APART FROM MYTH AND MIRACLE ' 

diseases were cured by handkerchiefs which had 
touched the body of Paul, but this does not affect 
in the least our estimate of Paul's greatness, 
nor take away one jot or tittle from the value 
and inspiration of that remarkable series of letters, 
written by his own hand, which have been pre- 
served to us in the New Testament. 

The question of miracles does not seem to me 
so important as those who believe in them, and 
many who disbelieve in them, would have us think. 
It is said that the Christian faith is grounded 
on and attested by miracles. But if Christianity 
can only be believed because it is accompanied 
by miracles, it rests on a rotten foundation. 
No miracle, no manifestation of power, can prove 
rnoral and spiritual truth. This is not the popular 
opinion, but a simple illustration will make it 
clear. Suppose I could change by a wave of 
the hand, this- Bible on my desk into a plum- 
pudding, I should not make what I am saying 
truer or more reasonable. Such a miracle would 
not prove that I was a teacher sent from God 
or that my doctrines were the truth of heaven. 
It would prove that I knew a good deal about 
the transmutation of one substance into another 
substance, but it would by no means prove 
that I was an authority on questions of faith 
and conduct. Yet I know that many ignorant 
people would feel differently. In their judgment, 



MIRACLES UNIMPORTANT I93 

could I visibly and undeniably, without any 
trickery learned of Maskelyne and Cooke, change 
this Bible into a plum-pudding, or this hymn-book 
into a loaf of bread, I should be regarded as an 
infallible teacher of morals and religion. But 
educated common sense knows that such a 
tremendous inference is quite irrational. Unless 
the reason is convinced, and the heart captivated, 
and the conscience quickened by the truth itself, 
no miracle and no wonder can commend it to us 
as the Bread of Life. 

Theologians say of Christianity, All is gone if 
miracles are given up ; Atheists say, Miracles 
are no longer credible, therefore Christianity is 
false. I deny the one as I deny the other. I 
say that the Theologian attaches too much value 
to the preservation of miracles, and the Atheist 
too much value to their destruction. All that is 
purest, brightest, and best in Christianity, all 
that appeals to conscience, which has a purifying 
influence on the heart, which makes known to 
men a Father's grace and truth, which touches 
the mystic susceptibilities of the spirit, is altogether 
independent of this miracle or that. What makes 
a man a Christian, is not belief in the accuracy of 
the writer who tells us that Christ restored the 
ear of the servant cut oif by Peter in a moment 
of blind frenzy, but to be pure in heart, to hunger 
and thirst after righteousness, to be meek and 

N 



194 APART FROM MYTH AND MIRACLE 

merciful, and to love as Christ loved, to trust 
and obey a Father in heaven in Christ's spirit, to 
cherish the mind that was in Jesus. Nothing of 
value in Christ's teaching, nothing of wisdom in 
his words, nothing of beauty in his character, 
nothing of inspiration in his example, nothing 
of persuasion in his cross escapes us when we give 
up miracles. It is not true, as is commonly 
asserted, that miracles are inseparable from the 
life of Christ or from the religion of the Bible. 
At this time of day it is monstrous to assert 
that if I am compelled to disbelieve in the story of 
the blasted fig-tree, I have no longer any right 
to call Christ my master, and that I can have no 
confidence in what he was and taught. It is 
both stupidity and folly to say that discipleship 
to Christ is impossible unless I believe that Peter 
drew a fish to the shore with a penny in its mouth. 
Jesus Christ rises in my estimation as I see his 
wonderful influence over men was gained, not 
by exhibitions of magical power, but by the force 
of his unique character, his limitless self-sacrifice, 
his grasp of the burden of sin, his fellowship 
with God, his unbounded, never-failing sympathy. 
I do not take up the position that miracles are 
impossible. I do not know what is possible or 
impossible in God's world. Whether miracles 
have ever happened is entirely a question of 
evidence. Is the evidence trustworthy ? Does 



THE EVIDENCE FOR MIRACLE I95 

it come from people whose habits of observation 

prevent them falling into mistake ? Or, does 

it come to us from an age accustomed to believe 

in the marvellous, when faith in miracles was 

in the air, when wonders were looked for, and 

myths and legends sprang up as in their natural 

soil ? What is the worth and amount of the 

evidence ? For evidence, it must be remembered, 

may be perfectly honest and yet mistaken. I 

have no patience and no respect for those who say 

that the Biblical writers were impostors because 

they recorded as miraculous things that were 

not miracles. There is no reflection on the moral 

character of these men. I could as soon believe 

in that most improbable of all the miracles, 

in the standing still of the sun in heaven, as 

believe that a man like John would tell lies even 

to magnify the fame of his master. Witnesses 

are often true and upright, and yet their evidence 

is not trustworthy. The men and women who 

gave evidence as to the baleful influence and the 

dark deeds of witches were quite honest and 

believed every word they said ; but we now know 

that they were mistaken. The simple-minded 

peasants of Galilee, seeing how the paralysed 

and the demoniac were cured, cried a miracle ! 

a miracle ! whereas growing experience and 

observation show that here was an instance of a 

not uncommon force often exercised by the 



196 APART FROM MYTH AND MIRACLE 

healthy over the unhealthy, the perfectly sane, 
morally and intellectually, over the insane — the 
force of will, of emotion, of imagination and faith. 
For many of the so-called miracles of healing were 
not miracles at all, but are to be accounted for 
by a well-known although little investigated 
and little understood law of mental and moral 
influence.^ We know what was not known years 
ago, how greatly the mind influences the body : 
how by acting on the imagination and emotions, 
and by the power of living faith, wonderful and 
instantaneous cures have been wrought in accord- 
ance with natural laws. Quackery and deception 
have often been mixed up with cases of this kind ; 
but no physician and no man of any general 
intelligence would doubt that such cures have been 
and still are, occasionally, performed. We may 
find instances quoted by such great authorities 
as Dr. Maudsley and Dr. Carpenter. The cure 
of a man sick of the palsy — that is paralysis — 
in this way would be a miracle for the spectators 
of the first century, while it would be no miracle 
now. Of course such a power of healing is 
confined to diseases which arise out of a more 
or less deranged nervous system : it might cure 
or alleviate neuralgia, as we know mesmerism 
does, but it could not restore a lost limb. 

Now it should be noticed that the majority of 

1 Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma. 



MIRACLE AND FAITH-HEALING I97 

Christ's ' mighty works ' were acts of heahng 
of this sort, and these acts of heahng by a faith 
wrought upon through imagination and emotion 
must be separated from those alleged marvels, 
such as the restoration of the lost ear cut off by 
Peter, or the blasting of the fig-tree, or the drown- 
ing of the swine, in which faith could not be a 
factor. We can no longer believe in marvels 
demanding a suspension of the laws of nature ; 
but we can very easily believe in the acts of 
healing brought about by the action of one 
mind on another, and by the response of faith, 
because we have seen such instances in our 
own day, and know that all this is in accordance 
with nature. 

Many people in these days have given up all 
miracles except those recorded in the Bible. 
They think that the miracles of the Buddhists 
and Brahmins and Mohammedans are altogether 
false ; that the miracles of the Greek and Roman 
Churches are impostures ; but that the miracles 
of the Bible form a class by themselves. Yet, if 
the question is to be settled by evidence, there 
is just as good testimony for many other miracles 
as well as those of the Bible. We read in the 
New Testament of the blind restored to sight, 
and we believe. But St. Augustine tells us that 
when he was a young man living in the city of 
Milan, a revelation was made to the great bishop 



igS APART FROM MYTH AND MIRACLE 

Ambrose of the place where two martyrs, Gervasius 
and Protasius, were buried. Many crowded to 
behold these venerable relics, and among them 
a man who was entirely blind. After much 
persuasion and pushing, the blind man made his 
way up the church to the shrine where the bodies 
lay, had his hand laid on the face-cloth of one 
of the sacred corpses and applied it to his eyes. 
Whereupon he received his sight. This, we are 
told by the stickler for Bible miracles only, 
was an imposture or an illusion. Why ? The 
evidence supposed to prove the one is not a bit 
better than the evidence supposed to prove the 
other. Augustine was a man of the keenest 
intellect, and every whit as trustworthy as the 
writers of the four Gospels. He tells us that the 
cure of the blind man was known to himself and 
to the whole city, and excited a passion of joy 
and gratitude. Yet we are sure Augustine was 
mistaken. But if we cannot trust Augustine, 
how can we trust St. Luke ? 

Or, take the most striking of all the miracles 
recorded in the New Testament — a miracle 
exceeding in wonder even the raising of Lazarus. 
It describes an incident following immediately 
on the death of Jesus : — 

' And the earth did quake ; and the tomb were 
ofened : and many bodies of the saints that had 
fallen asleep were raised ; and coming forth out of 



AN ASTOUNDING MIRACLE I99 

the tombs after his resurrection they entered into 
the holy city and appeared unto many.^^ 

Did you ever consider what a marvel is here 
recorded ? The raising of Lazarus from the dead 
was the raising of one ; but here many were raised, 
and not simply after four days, but after age of 
entombment, and they appeared in the streets of 
Jerusalem. They w^ere not ghosts ; their bodies 
were raised, and they were seen by many. There 
is a circumstantiality about the narrative which 
shows the writer really believed it. But then, 
look at the difhculties of the narrative to us. 
What became of their bodies ? Did these saints 
live their lives over again on earth ? or did they 
go back to their tombs after a few hours or days ? 
These are questions on which the narrative 
throws no light. A still more important question 
arises : how is it that this staggering, stupendous 
miracle is recorded in only one of the four Gospels ? 
The other evangelists must have known it as well 
as Matthew : it was not a thing done in a corner, 
nor a thing that could be kept secret. Yet there 
is not a word of it in any other part of the New 
Testament, although it is impossible to imagine 
that Mark, Luke, and John would have been silent 
about an event so full of significance if it had 
really happened. We are driven to the conclusion 
that this is a mere myth, built up by the pious 

1 Matthew xxvii. 51-3. 



200 APART FROM MYTH AND MIRACLE 

imagination of some later disciple, and when it 
had been generally received as true, incorporated 
with the Gospel story. 

For we have come to see how this sort of story, 
legend, or myth grows up. Herodotus relates 
that when the Persian invaders came to Delphi, 
two local heroes buried near the place arose, 
and were seen by many, fighting on behalf of the 
Greeks. Herodotus writes here of times when 
he himself was alive ; not of a fabulous antiquity. 
By his training he was a far more competent 
observer of facts than the evangelists, and his 
character stands as high as theirs. 

Yet we say Herodotus was mistaken. No one 
now believes that this really happened. It makes 
a beautiful legend for poetry and art ; but if any 
one contends that Phylacus and Antonous actually 
arose out of their graves and took part in that 
battle between Greeks and Persians, we should 
regard him as demented. In an age when men 
are looking out for the marvellous, any unusual 
circumstance takes on a supernatural complexion, 
and a very few years suffices to produce a full- 
grown myth. The story of Herodotus and the 
story of St. Matthew, when placed side by side, are 
seen to be of the same sort, and to arise out of the 
same expectation of the wonderful. But we do 
not discredit Herodotus as an historian because 
in instances like this he was mistaken. We 



MIRACLES AS PARABLES 201 

discriminate. Neither do we discredit St. Matthew 
because he was sometimes mistaken. We dis- 
criminate. 

For my own part, I should be sorn,^ to use an 
expurgated Bible — a Bible from which all these 
stories of marvels and miracles had been cut out. 
They are ' linked to many a truth divine,' they 
have become to us full of s\mibohcal meaning, 
parables and poetry suggestive of much that is 
valuable. Treat them as parables and poetr\^, 
and they help to nourish the religious life : treat 
them as histor}', and they become more and more 
an intellectual stumbling-block But suppose we 
expunge them entirely from the Bible, what then ? 
WTiat have we left ? Almost ever\'thing of value. 
We have a noble and instructive histor\' in which 
we are shown, on a large scale, man's moral and 
rehgious development. We have a histor}^ in 
which is revealed to our gaze, as in no other histor}', 
what is the secret of a nation's strength and 
happiness. Other nations are like bees working 
under ordinary' hives of straw ; this nation is 
like a community of bees working under a glass 
hive. We are permitted to see more clearly 
in their case than in others the providential 
hand of God, both in blessing and in punishment. 
We have ' the goodty fellowship of the prophets,' 
and their insight into the truth and the ways of 
God ; we have the evolution of a spiritual from 



202 APART FROM MYTH AND MIRACLE 

a carnal Israel ; we have lawgivers and seers, 
in advance of their times, bringing the world on 
from stage to stage of moral conception ; we 
have poets expressing in words which are for all 
time the hopes, the sorrows, the burdens, the 
penitence, the aspirations, the triumphant faith 
of the human heart. And, to pass over much else, 
we have a character, unique in human history, 
which in its beauty, tenderness, matchless grace, 
love of truth, spiritual power, moral perfection, 
and universal sympathy, stands out as the ' first- 
horn among many brethren,'' ' the chief among ten 
thousand,^ and this even though he never walked 
upon the stormy waters, and was the son of a 
human father ! 

We have been singing this evening Christmas 
carols which repeat in our ears, year by year, 
the beautiful myth with which the Gospel story 
opens. If you question me, I am compelled to 
say that I can no more believe a choir of angels 
carolled over the sheepfolds of Bethlehem, than 
I can believe that the world was made in six days. 
But far be it from me to say that the account 
of creation given in Genesis is of no value to me 
because I cannot accept it as science and history. 
On the contrary, it is to me full of instruction. 
It is a myth, but it grows out of a kernel of fact — 
that God and not chance made the world, that one 
Divine Being is the sole cause of the universe, that 



THE FACT WITHIN THE LEGEND 203 

all noble work is gradual, that man is made in God's 
image. iVs poetry I read it, and find it full of 
spiritual suggestion. If I may use it, not as history, 
but as the Psalm of creation, I will gladly do so. 

Even as the opening words of the Old Testament 
are the Psalm of creation, so the opening words 
of the Gospel narrative may be called the Psalm 
of the new creation. Is Christmas an exploded 
legend because the stories of a miraculous incarna- 
tion and angelic appearances are only myths ? 
Not at all. The myths have grown up around a 
kernel of fact. Jesus was bom, whether an 
angel did or did not say, ' Behold, I bring you 
tidings of great joy.'' The solid fact of history 
marked by Christmas is the coming of Jesus, 
with its inexhaustible train of consequences, its 
unspeakable riches. It is tidings of great joy, 
and glory to God, and peace on earth, although the 
angelic song only arose out of the devout imagina- 
tions and fervours of early disciples. Beautiful 
and beneficent ideas are enshrined in the myth, 
and the heart of Christendom to-day gladly seizes 
the poetical expression which early faith gave 
to the advent of its Master. No more fitting 
vehicle for the hopes and joys awakened by the 
coming and the world-wide influence of Christ 
can be found than this exquisitely touching legend 
from the past — gleaming with the lights, faces, and 
music of a heavenly world. 



XIII 

THE RIGHT USE AND INTERPRETATION 
OF THE BIBLE 

Picking up the other day a journal pubhshed 
by the Secularists, I read the following short and 
pithy announcement : — ' The day of the Bible 
is over,' which to my mind was very much 
the same as if a man who had managed to 
exist on nuts, blackberries, and mushrooms, had 
solemnly announced to the world, the day of 
bread is over. On the contrary, we may con- 
fidently say, while here and there a man may be 
found who has learned to do without bread, 
for the vast majority of the human race, so long 
as they experience the daily return of hunger, 
so long will they turn to bread as their natural 
and enjoyable food. The day of the Bible is 
over ? Precisely the contrary, I venture to say, 
is the case. The day of the Bible is yet to come. 
Hitherto the Bible has been largely misconceived ; 
the letter has been exalted above the spirit ; it 



THE BIBLE NOT A CRYPTOGRAM 205 

has been alternately quoted and derided as a 
scientific authority ; men have gone to it as to 
a book of magic to save themselves from the 
trouble and responsibility of choosing and deciding ; 
they have interpreted its sayings and events by 
methods which make it mean anything under the 
sun. Not long ago we were all laughing over 
The Great Cryptogram, a foolish book by a fooHsh 
American, intended to prove that Lord Bacon 
wrote Shakespeare's plays. The author professed 
to have discovered in the plays themselves the 
key to a great puzzle. By piecing together 
certain lines occurring on certain pages, and 
at more or less regular intervals from each other ; 
and by dividing words into halves, and then 
joining the half of one word to the half of another 
word, and so on, he made the plays tell us that 
Bacon was their author. But by the same method 
another ingenious puzzle maker could prove as 
easily that Abraham Lincoln wrote Romeo and 
Juliet, and the Duke of Wellington As you like it. 
It is not too much to say that the Bible has been 
too often treated as a great cryptogram. That 
truly devout soul and Christian poet, John Keble, 
adopted and defended an astonishing instance 
of this kind of cryptogrammic interpretation 
from one of the ancient Fathers. ' See,' he says, 
' how Abraham, who first gave circumcision, 
looked forward to Jesus. He circumcised the 



206 RIGHT USE OF THE BIBLE 

men of his household, in number 318. And this 
is a type of Christ on the cross, because 318 may 
be represented in Greek by the letters t t 7;, of 
which T is in the shape of a cross, and t r^ 
stand for the two first letters in the name of Jesus.' 
This, of course, is a puzzle and not a very clever 
one either, for the whole point turns on the passage 
after it has been translated into Greek, since the 
Hebrew letters have no such numerical signification. 
But the puzzle breaks down again when we remem- 
ber that 318 was the number of Abraham's house- 
hold not at the time of circumcision, but long 
before in the war with Chedorlaomer. This is 
explained by the theory that the mystery of the 
number was wonderfully revealed to Abraham 
and that his household was providentially kept 
at the same figure. Now the sad thing is, not 
that this was an interpretation discovered by an 
ignorant Father in the second century, but 
that it should be adopted and endorsed by a 
learned divine in the nineteenth century. It 
is one out of a thousand instances which might 
be given to show that the habit of interpreting 
the Bible as a puzzle still flourishes. I can 
only say if the Bible means all this plain men 
and women can never hope to understand it. 
Thank God, we are beginning to see that explana- 
tions like these do not interpret the Bible at all, 
but obscure it. That, , in spite of such childish 



THE FUTURE OF THE BIBLE 207 

methods of exposition, the Bible has worked so 
mightily in the past for uplifting, instruction, 
and comfort is a wonderful testimony to its vitality 
and influence, which no stupidity of commentators 
has been able to suppress. But we are only just 
shaking off these obscurities and shackles of 
interpretation, and the great days of Bible- 
influence are not in the past, but in the future. 
'When once we learn to read the Bible simply 
and naturally, taking it for what it is, and not 
for what we think we should like it to be, it will 
get a hold upon the human heart such as it has 
never had before. Believing as I do that the 
Bible is one of the best gifts God ever gave to 
man, I believe that when it is valued for right 
reasons and not for wrong ones, and we have put 
its use and enjoyment on sure and safe grounds, 
it will exercise a sway over the growing life of man 
which will leave far behind all its past achievements. 
' The letter killeth ; the spirit giveth life.'' This 
great saying I believe to be the key to the right 
use and interpretation of the Bible. We men 
of the nineteenth century, steeped in the habits, 
occupations, and thoughts of an entirely different 
civilization from that in which the Bible came 
to birth, are all abroad when reading it, unless 
we have learned to distinguish between the 
form and the essence, the transitory and the 
permanent, the accidental and the essential. 



208 RIGHT USE OF THE BIBLE 

and to discriminate these two elements in religion 
and in a religious literature. It is blind adhesion 
to the letter which has so often led the Church 
into untenable positions. The real authority of 
the Bible has been gravely imperilled when men 
have invoked its letter to prove that it was 
impossible that human beings should live at the 
antipodes, that it was impious to believe that 
the earth went round the sun, that geology was 
a delusive science because it taught that creation 
was not the work of six days but of untold ages, 
that resistance to even the most arbitrary govern- 
ment is forbidden to Christian men, that God 
for his own greater glory has sent some men into 
the world foreordained to eternal damnation. 
All these mistakes arose from clinging to the 
form and forgetting the essence. ' It is the 
spirit that quickeneth : the flesh profiteth nothing. "^ 
Literalism has been the curse of Biblical inter- 
pretation. 

But I would have you remember that there is 
literalism and literalism. It was a great saying 
of Martin Luther's, ' The words of the Holy Ghost 
can have no more than one simplest sense which 
we call the scriptural or the literal meaning.' 
There is a sense in which literalism is among the 
first duties of the Biblical student. We are to 
go to Scripture, not to find what we think, but 
what the writers said. Our first duty is to ascer- 



LITERALISM 209 

tain the exact meaning of the words they used, 
the meaning they must have had to those who first 
heard them. We must beware of reading into 
them our own dogmatic bias. In this sense, 
literaHsm, the rigid and determined exclusion of 
mere mystic fancies, the insistence on the 
grammatical, philological, historical, simple sense 
of the words, is of the utmost importance. 

The wrong kind of literalism is that which 
sacrifices the sense to the mere sound ; the 
kind of literalism which insists on abiding by the 
hard, naked letter in defiance of every rule which 
modifies the use of language. It is the temper 
of mind which reads poetry as if it were prose ; 
which, for instance, if it found in the Bible the 
words ' All the world's a stage, and all the men 
and women merely players,' would insist that the 
Christian could only lawfully follow one calling, 
that of the actor. ' God,' as Luther so admirably 
said, ' does not reveal grammatical vocables, 
but he reveals essential things.' All human 
language, from its very nature is and must be 
very imperfect. The language of the Bible is 
full of gracious shadows. Thousands of texts 
of scripture, many of the utterances of Jesus, 
were never meant to be taken according to the 
letter ; nay — if so taken, they would stand in 
antagonism to the essence of his teaching. 
Parables and metaphors, figures of speech, the 

o 



210 RIGHT USE OF THE BIBLE 

particular illustrations of great principles, must 
be taken into consideration at every step. 

The strangest thing about the unintelligent 
literalism which dominates popular theology is 
that it is so perfectly arbitrary in its application. 
It will insist with tenacity upon the literal meaning 
of one text or set of texts which suits its purpose, 
while it calmly explains away as metaphorical 
another text or set of texts, which, if understood 
with equal literalism, would involve the modifica- 
tion or abandonment of some favourite dogma. 
They insist that when we read, ' everlasting 
punishment' everlasting must be interpreted 
according to the letter as meaning for ever, and 
ever, and ever ; but when we read ' everlasting 
hills, "^ they say everlasting is a figure of speech I 
''All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God,^^ 
means all ; but, ' 7, if I be lifted up from the 
earth, will draw all men unto me,'^ means, not all, 
but some. There are thousands who denounce 
us as infidels when we call the story of the Fall 
of Man a myth or an allegory ; and yet the same 
persons will, without the slightest warrant, apply 
the most extravagant allegory to verse after verse- 
of the Song of Solomon. It was this arbitrariness 
which made the Roman Catholic controversialists 
say that Scripture was treated by Protestants 
as * a nose of wax,' to be twisted this way or that : 

"^Romans iii. 23. ^ John xii. 32. 



THE LETTER KILLETH 211 

a sword which they could put into any scabbard. 

What is wanted is intelligence, common sense, 
an appreciation of the limitations of language, 
and a conviction that the Bible is to be read in 
the same way that any other book is read, with 
discrimination — not turning poetry into prose, 
nor taking metaphor and illustration for command 
and dogma. John Bun^^an used to be distracted 
\\ith agony because he took quite literally the 
saying, ' // ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, 
ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove'^he?ice to 
yonder place, and it shall remove ' ;^ and therefore 
felt driven to test his own faith by bidding the 
puddles on the Bedford road dr}- up at a word. 
But he would never have been troubled had he 
understood that Jesus was just using one of 
the common metaphors of the East, perfectly 
intelligible to his hearers. The notion that to 
' remove mountains ' was to be taken literally, 
was one which would onh^ have caused a smile 
on the face of men who were accustomed to confer 
on any great teacher the comphmentar}-^ title of 
' A Remover of Mountains.' The\' would have 
understood in a moment that Jesus was expressing 
the divine truth that difficulties vanish before 
the power of faith. 

' The letter killeth : the spirit giveth life' This 
is to say, we must use the Bible, not as a book of 

1 Matthew xvii. 20. 



212 RIGHT USE OF THE BIBLE 

rules, but as a book of principles. You all know 
the difference between a rule and a principle. 
It is the difference between a loaf of bread and a 
handful of corn. The loaf of bread is more 
immediately useful to a hungry man than a 
handful of corn. But when he has eaten it there 
is an end of it. It answers a temporary purpose, 
but to-morrow he wants another. A handful of 
corn, however, while it will not satisfy to-day's 
hunger, has in it the promise and potency of bread 
for generations. If sown it will bring forth a 
hundred-fold, and if sown again there will be a 
harvest sufficient for a nation's wants. A rule 
is for to-day ; principles are for all time. A 
rule only fits a particular set of circumstances — 
change the circumstances, and the rule breaks 
down ; but principles adapt themselves to all 
circumstances. The principle is, ' Thou shalt 
love thy neighbour as thyself ' ; the rule was 
almsgiving. Now, however, the rule is no alms- 
giving, because it is no longer love to our 
neighbour to give to beggars in the street, but 
very great injury. Many of the illustrations of 
Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount are sore 
stumbling-blocks to people, because they think 
the illustrations are commands for all time. 
But the essential things are the principles — 
benevolence, the forgiveness of injuries, patience, 
sacrifice. How are we to apply these principles to 



MORAL IMPULSE 213 

the circumstances of our own day is left to sancti- 
fied common sense. 

' The letter killeth : the spirit giveth life,'' This 
is to say, we go to the Bible, not for moral maxims, 
but for moral impulse ; not for a scheme of faith, 
but for spiritual inspiration. Moral maxims of 
equal beauty may be found in other books. 
Confucius and Seneca will supply us with a code 
of ethics much more systematic than anything we 
find in the Bible. What they do not supply us 
with is moral impulse. In the Bible the first thing 
that strikes us is, not the completeness of the 
ethical code, but the variety, interest, and charm 
of human biography with which it is filled. In 
its men and women we see good struggling with 
evil, a higher moral law ever calling them to 
fresh conquests, and embodying itself in their 
lives and endeavours. And there is something 
quickening in the story of moral effort in a human 
soul which is never found in a maxim. What we 
want in setting out on the journey of life is not a 
moral handbook with cut and dried rules for every 
difficulty, but the light and impulse of great 
examples. We want to know what others have 
done — the pioneers of godliness. We are artists 
who can never learn our profession from any 
manual of art, however complete ; but whose 
first necessity is to sit at the feet of the old masters 
and study their methods, achievements, and 



214 RIGHT USE OF THE BIBLE 

aims. If we do this merely to make ourselves 
slavish imitators of the great artists of other days, 
then we shall utterly fail ; but if we do it to 
enable us to profit by the efforts of the past in 
our own attempts to reach the ideal glimmering 
upon a far horizon, then it is invaluable. The 
Bible is full of most glorious examples, not to be 
copied in every particular, but to give us impulse 
to strive as they strove. Above all, it is 
dominated by one example which is unique. 
Here, indeed, in Jesus Christ, is a man. The 
world had never seen before what it was to be a 
man. It had heard plenty of moral maxims. 
Poets and prophets, lawgivers and psalmists, 
had set before it an ideal of the Perfect Life in 
words, but here was one in whom the words — 

, . . . had breath, and wrought 
With human hands, the creed of creeds, 
In loveliness of perfect deeds 

More strong than all poetic thought. 

Christ was not so much a wonderful teacher 
as he was a wonderful fulfilment ; he came not 
to give a new moral code, but to live a life, and in 
that life to realize all moral aspiration. In him 
moral beauty is no longer an abstraction : it is 
warm, living, and concrete ; we can now believe 
in it, and we are moved by that glorious, pathetic 
life to believe that great moral achievement is 
no impossible thing for us. Following a leader 



SPIRITUAL POWER 215 

as we could never follow a maxim, we do and 
conquer a thousand things we should otherwise 
never attempt. What we receive from him is 
moral impulse — not a letter, but a spirit. 

In the same way we go to the Bible, not to 
find a scheme of faith, but spiritual inspiration. 
If the Bible is to supply us with a ready-made 
creed, then it is wonderful that there should be 
such differences as to what this creed is. If it is 
intended as a formal treatise, supematurally 
drawn up, to serve as a textbook of theology, 
then it must be pronounced a dismal failure. 
It is not a formal treatise at all, but a great 
literature, and it is not by quoting texts to prove 
our particular doctrines, but by saturating our 
minds with its spirit that we use it aright. How 
many books on theology, on the creeds, on various 
doctrines there are, which all proceed upon the 
method of proving this or that by an array of 
texts quoted from the Old and New Testaments, 
from poetical and prose writings, from historj'- 
and legend, from Judges and Job as freely as 
from the synoptic Gospels, quoted indiscrimi- 
nately and with no reference to the context. 
This is the abuse of the Bible. I once heard a 
good man prove the doctrine of the Atonement 
from the story of Cain and Abel. He told us that 
Abel's sacrifice was more acceptable than Cain's 
because it consisted of blood, whereas Cain's only 



2l6 RIGHT USE OF THE BIBLE 

consisted of fruit. And this, forsooth, proved 
that sin could only be expiated by blood ! Such 
a use of the Bible would be impious if it were not 
childish. No, the true use of the Bible is not to 
prove doctrine, but to move the heart to prayer, 
aspiration, loving effort, hopeful sympathy. When 
I read the words, ' The eternal God is thy refuge, 
and underneath are the everlasting arms ' ; when I 
catch the strains of David's harp, ' The sacrifices 
of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite 
heart, God, thou wilt not despise ' ; when I listen 
to Isaiah's invitation, ' Ho ! every one that thirsteth, 
come ye to the waters ' ; when I hear John saying, 
' God is love,'' then I am lifted up above my 
ordinary self, I feel the attraction of the heavenly 
above the earthly, and there is excited in the soul 
a sense of life, love, and peace, which is worth 
more than all creeds. The glow of a living faith 
draws me near to God, and I am moved by that 
spirit of purity, truth, and self-sacrifice, which 
is the inspiration of the religious life everywhere, 
and the vital impulse of all true progress. 



XIV 

THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

Those of you who are alive to the movements 
of religious thought in our day, or are in the habit 
of reading our religious journals, must be famiUar 
with the phrase The Higher Criticism. You 
have seen it in the reports of speeches, sermons, 
and lectures, in leading articles, in magazines, 
and in the letters of angry or dismayed correspon- 
dents attacking it. To those of us who long ago 
gave up the popular theories of Biblical inspiration 
the anger and dismay seem both belated and 
absurd. It is as if at this time of day there 
could stiU be found adherents of the Ptolemaic 
astronomy, filled vaih. anger against Copernicus 
and all his works. The controversies aroused by 
Colenso, Dean Stanley, Jowett, the pioneers of 
the higher criticism, seem so far away, and the 
position they took up, which once aroused the 
fiercest passions of men and churches are now so 
generally accepted even in orthodox circles, 



2l8 THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

that it is a little surprising to see good men still 
alarmed at what the higher criticism is doing. 
For one thing is certain — the higher criticism so 
far has not diminished any man's regard for the 
Bible, but by enabling it to be better understood, 
has enhanced its value even in the eyes of the 
most thoroughgoing of critics. That this will 
likewise be the result of new labours in the 
critical field not one scholar in a hundred ever 
doubts. 

This much may be said in excuse for the 
alarmists, that the phrase, The Higher Criticism, 
is somewhat vague, and needs exposition before 
it can be properly understood. A ' critic ' is one 
who is able to distinguish, and ' criticism ' means 
the power or art of distinguishing. But there are 
of course wrong kinds of ' distinguishing ' or 
criticism. Roughly speaking there are three 
kinds of criticism applied to the Bible. 

I. There is ' Textual ' criticism — the examina- 
tion of the words and their meaning when first 
used, and of the various ' readings ' of any given 
passage in the best manuscripts ; the proof that 
this passage or that has been interpolated and 
forms no part of the original text ; or the proof 
that words and sentences have been wrongly 
translated. It was textual criticism to which 
the Bible was submitted by the Revisers, and 
the Revised Version is one of its noblest triumphs. 



THREE KINDS OF CRITICISM 219 

2. Secondly, there is ''Historical' criticism — 
the weighing of the evidence for alleged events, 
the measure of proof that they did or did not 
happen, etc. Did the walls of Jericho actually 
fall down at the blowing of trumpets ? Did 
the body of Jesus, reanimated, come out of 
the tomb ? Was Jesus born at Nazareth or 
Bethlehem ? These and many other disputed 
events are submitted to a criticism of judgment 
called ' historical,' they are weighed by evidence, 
by congruity, by probability, in fact by the 
same tests we apply to alleged events in Grecian 
or Roman histor}^ 

3. Lastly, we come to the ' Higher Criticism,'' 
which is partly historical, and more largely 
' Literary,' and still more largely the application 
of human feeling, moral consciousness, and 
sanctified common sense to the problems of the 
Bible. The ' lower ' criticism of the letter is 
' textual ' ; the ' higher ' criticism has in it a 
spiritual element. It does not ask, ' Is this saying 
to be found in all the best authorities ? ' but, 
' Does it bear the marks of inspiration ? is it 
congruous with other sayings of the same teacher ? 
is it a genuine utterance of the speaker's or 
writer's when tried by what we know he was 
in life and character ? ' x\gain, ' while this 
passage or that belongs to the text as we have it, 
was it really written by the man whose name it 



220 THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

l>ears ? or have we in this book tradition gathered 
irom various sources, the work of various hands, 
and embedded in the narrative — a skilful patch- 
work instead of a garment woven throughout 
on one loom ? Let us suppose a chapter of 
English history containing paragraphs from Bede, 
King Alfred, and William of Malmesbury, woven 
together into a narrative by some later hand 
and published under the name of Hume. The 
distinguishing of these paragraphs, showing their 
various authors would be one of the labours of 
higher criticism. Yet again, ' When the text 
of an ancient writing has been settled as accurately 
as possible by the canon of textual criticism, 
it becomes the province of the " higher " criticism 
to determine its origin, date, and (if it be 
composite) literary structure, by distinguishing 
between the data available for the purpose.'^ 

I cannot, however, agree with Professor Driver 
in limiting the higher criticism to questions 
of date, origin, and literary structure. Higher 
criticism is more than literary and historical ; 
it tries any given utterance by moral and spiritual 
standards, and asks does it bear the notes of 
congruity and of a genuine inspiration. For 
instance, are these long discourses about the end 
of the world put into the mouth of Christ at the 
close of Matthew's gospel at all in keeping with 

1 Driver ; Preface to Lectures on the Higher Criticism. 



THINGS INCREDIBLE 221 

what we know of the character and temper and 
method of Christ, and with his teaching as a whole ? 
Textual criticism has decided that they are a 
genuine part of the book. But although they are 
there, did Christ really utter them, or have we 
here genuine fragments of his teaching enlarged 
and misinterpreted by the legends and expectations 
which grew up about him in the early church ? 
In Mark xiii. we are told that certain of the 
disciples went privately to the Master and asked 
him when these ' last things ' should be. In reply 
he is reported to have said, of the sundry 
marvellous signs and wonders which had taken 
place, the Son of Man would be seen coming in 
clouds with great power and glory. ' And then 
shall he send forth the angels, and shall gather together 
his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost 
part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven. . . . 
Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not 
pass away until alt these things he accomplished.^ 
Now is it credible cihat Christ told his hearers 
that in their own lifetime he would come back 
to earth and reign in great glory ? We know 
that all these expectations of an immediate 
second advent cherished by the early church were 
disappointed. Was Christ the author of the 
disappointment ? Did he really believe and 
teach that in less than thirty years time he 
would come back to earth in clouds, with great 



222 THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

power and glory ? That cannot be answered by 
textual, historical, or literary criticism. It can 
only be answered by what I have called ' sanctified 
common sense,' that is by a sympathetic insight 
into the mind and character of Christ himself ; 
and by asking, Is this like him ? Is it congruous 
with the whole trend of his teaching ? Is it likely 
that he himself was deceived ? Is it in keeping 
with his simplicity and spirituality that he should 
talk in this mundane, scenic, not to say sensational 
way ? I do not believe it. It seems to me it is 
impossible for anyone to believe it who realizes 
the spiritual character of Christ's teaching, and 
his wholly spiritual idea of the kingdom, and how 
he was always endeavouring to check the common 
notion of a material kingdom, with thrones and 
power and palaces, trying instead to make 
men realize that it was inward and spiritual. 
The prophecy in Mark xiii. is largely materialistic. 
It gives expression to a national dream which 
Christ was so far from countenancing that he 
strove unceasingly to turn men from it. To 
proclaim not the advent but the eternal presence 
of the universal kingdom was his self-imposed 
mission. About this the higher criticism says. 
We have here something quite foreign from the 
mind and character of Christ : being what he was 
and in view of his fundamental doctrine of 
inwardness it was impossible that he should 



MISTAKES OF INTERPRETATION 223 

speak in this theatrical fashion. In parts of this 
chapter we breathe a quite different atmosphere 
from the Sermon on the Mount, the great parables, 
and the unquestioned ethical and spiritual teaching 
of the Master. Interpreted by these, much of 
this prophecy rings spurious, and must be laid 
aside as essentially false to the mind of him who 
said ' The Kingdom of God is within you.'^ 

I know it may be objected that this aspect of 
the higher criticism depends very much upon 
individual tact and perception, and requires a 
delicacy of touch and a sensitiveness of discern- 
ment which must always be uncertain in operation. 
But it is not claimed that this method is infallible. 
There is no method of interpreting the Bible 
which is free from mistake. The strictest adherent 
to the theory of Biblical infallibility has never 
claimed infallibility of interpretation. Further, 
Bible-study and interpretation is always governed 
by the assured knowledge and existing ideas of any 
given age. The idea of evolution has entirely 
changed the modern student's view of the Bible. 
In making that change the nineteenth century 
suffered a certain loss as well as rejoiced in a 
certain gain, and in some cases was led to 
erroneous conclusions. The higher criticism can 
claim no freedom from human error, neither can 
textual nor historical criticism. But the ability 
1 See Lecture VI. 



224 THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

required to distinguish between genuine and 
spurious sayings of Christ, the tact and deHcacy 
of perception necessary, are not beyond the reach 
of any devout, sympathetic mind. All it needs 
is such a sense of the moral fitness between cause 
and effect as can detect in the gospels the fountain 
ideas from which the purest streams of moral 
and spiritual influence in the world's history 
have flowed. Those whose business it is in 
banks and behind counters to deal with gold and 
silver coins, get to know without applying chemical 
tests but by simple touch and sight, the difference 
between good and bad money. So those who 
make it their business day by day to emulate the 
spirit of Christ, may quickly learn the art of 
distinguishing the fine gold of his words, even 
though they have little scholarship. 

The higher criticism thus has two aspects. 
In the first place it is that which brings the 
intellectual method of our time to bear upon 
Bible interpretation ; and secondly, it is that 
which brings to the same work a certain elevated 
spiritual discernment. 

In both divisions of the Bible these methods 
have been applied with the result of making 
the book as a whole more human, vivid, and 
instructive. The intellectual methods of the 
higher criticism, the methods of historical and 
especially of literary investigation have laid bare 



RESULTS 225 

the composite nature of the Hexateuch, showing 
us at least five different strands woven into the 
one web, and by editors who hved many hundred 
years after the death of Moses. It has placed the 
Book of Psalms under the microscope and dis- 
covered five separate collections of Jewish hymns, 
brought together in one book long after the return 
from exile, and teeming with ideas and conceptions 
which had no place in Jewish religious thought at 
the time of David. The most lenient judgment 
of scholars does not now allow David to have 
been the author of more than a dozen of these 
wonderful songs of penitence and praise. The 
higher criticism has clearly shown us two Isaiahs 
in the book of that name, and in the two divisions 
(ch. i.-xxxix. and ch. xl.-lxvi.) occasional frag- 
ments by other writers. But as I have indicated 
the higher criticism is not merely concerned with 
literary problems, questions of the date, author- 
ship, origin, etc. It goes on to appraise the 
moral and spiritual value of the various portions 
of the Old Testament. It is the higher criticism 
which places the Song of Solomon, Esther, and 
Book of Judges on a lower level of religious 
excellence than Job and Isaiah. It is sanctified 
common sense, it is the spiritual aspect of the 
higher criticism, which repudiates the tone and 
morality of the cursing Psalms. It is the Higher 
Criticism which condemns the barbarities of the 

p 



226 THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

Canaanitish wars, and refuses to allow them any- 
moral sanction because they are prefaced by the 
convenient formula — ' Thus saith the Lord.' It 
is the Higher Criticism which sets aside the 
thunder, lightning, and awful trumpet of Sinai 
as features that really accompanied the revelation 
of the Mosaic law. And if any are alarmed at 
this interpretation of the story, it is surely 
sufficient to remind them that the moral teaching 
of the Mosaic law remains untouched when all 
these picturesque elements have been stripped 
away. It is quite as wrong to steal and commit 
adultery although the rocks of the desert never 
echoed to a supernatural trumpet, and murder 
remains a crime although God never wrote 
the commandments on tables of stone. Higher 
Criticism is in fact the ability to distinguish 
between spiritual ideas and the drapery of legend, 
myth, and parable in which they are clothed, 
and which people destitute of imagination have 
too often mistaken for history. 

But now a strange thing happens. While all 
scholars are agreed on the duty and advantage 
of applying the principles of the higher criticism 
to the Old Testament, there are some who when 
it is proposed to apply the same principles to the 
New Testament, cry ' hands off ! ' Even that 
candid critic, Dr. Driver, appears to think that 
the ' Higher Criticism ' must be much more chary 



THE REAL FRIENDS OF THE BIBLE 227 

when dealing with the EvangeHsts than when 
Deuteronomy is under review,^ But it is im- 
possible to fence round the New Testament from 
criticism when once the Old Testament has been 
subjected to its standards. A Bishop may see 
no incongruity between declaring his beliefs in 
the mythical nature of the story of the Fall and 
his condemnation of one of his clergy for speak- 
ing of the story of the Virgin Birth in the same 
manner. But men of simple common sense will 
say that the liberty of criticism which is claimed 
for the supernatural stories of the Old Testament 
cannot with justice be denied to men when dealing 
with those of the New. And if it be replied that 
a fundamental doctrine of Christianity is bound 
up with the story of the Virgin Birth, it is only 
necessary to point out that an equally fundamental 
doctrine is bound up with the story of the Fall. 
It appears to be thought that the New Testament 
can be saved from the Higher Criticism by throw- 
ing the Old to the wolves. But the higher critics 
are not wolves waiting to devour. They are the 
real friends of the Bible, withdrawing our eyes 
from details which we once fancied important, 
and fixing them upon the eternal truths and the 
grander elements which have been more or less 
obscured. Of both portions of the Bible alike 
it may be said in the words of Archdeacon 

4 See Preface to The Higher Criticism. Hoddeif & Stoughton 



< 



228 THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

Wilberforce, ' intelligent criticism becomes the 
pathway to spiritual discovery.' 

The Higher Criticism for instance cannot be 
excluded from the consideration of the authorship 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The conclusion, 
now everywhere accepted, that Paul could not 
have been its author has been arrived at not 
simply along the line of literary structure and 
historical evidence. There has also entered into 
the problem the question — ' Does the teaching of 
Hebrews harmonize with the great Apostle's main 
ideas? or have we not here a different line of 
thought, and, in fact, a widely different theology 
from that which we find in Romans and Galatians ?' 
But this discovery of a different line of thought 
which does not fit in with what we know of the 
mind of Paul, does not detract from the value of 
Hebrews, or imply that it ought not to have a place 
in the New Testament. On the contrary, it 
adds to the interest and instruction of the New 
Testament when we see how early in the history 
of Christian thought differences appeared, so 
that John moves in one direction, Paul in another, 
and the anonymous author of Hebrews in a third.. 
This is a spiritual discovery of the most sugges- 
tive kind. 

The Higher Criticism has been busy with the 
Fourth Gospel. Great scholars still differ as to 
its date and authorship. Literary and historical 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 229 

criticism have not yet settled whether it was 
written by John or another. But in the midst 
of the dispute there is heard a knocking at the 
door, and a Higher Critic enters with the question 
— ' Whoever was the author, have we here a 
faithful, hteral record of the Master's words as 
he actually spoke, or a kind of translation of his 
ideas after they had passed through a mind 
coloured by a certain philosophy ? Are these 
long, subtle speeches, tinctured by Alexandrian 
philosophy, which we find in the Fourth Gospel, 
congruous with the Jesus of the Synoptics who 
speaks in short, proverbial sayings ? Is it a 
record of the Hfe and work of Christ we are reading 
or an interpretation ? '^ Literary and historical 
criticism have their place in this discussion, 
but the matter cannot be settled, the question 
can hardly be understood, without the aid of that 
other feature of this Higher Criticism, the spiritual 
discernment which is bom of famiharity with the 
mind and soul of Christ. A thorough acquaint- 
ance with the Jesus of the Synoptics compels us 
to say, quite apart from literary and historical 
investigations, ' what we have in the Fourth 
Gospel is a reconstruction, and a biography of 
Jesus from the point of view of a writer w^ho has 
a doctrine of the personahty of Christ to expound 

1 The Bible in the Nineteenth Century. By J. Estlin 
Carpenter, M.A. p. 412. 



230 THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

of which the earher evangeHsts knew Httle or 
nothing.' 

Let it then be understood that the Higher 
Criticism is not destructive but constructive, 
and lifts us up to where we see the moral and 
spiritual teaching of the Bible disencumbered 
of faulty history, of imperfect science, and of the 
swaddling bands of myth and legend. The Bible 
has a right to be understood. Our deep reverence 
for it compels us to interpret it along the Hue 
of its leading eternal and universal ideas, and 
not along the line of its local and temporary 
accompaniments. I know it sometimes seems 
that the devout and critical spirits are in conflict 
with each other, our own minds their battle-field, 
and that the former says to the latter, ' Thou art 
not a Christian ; I can have no fellowship with 
thee.' But to say that is to play false to our own 
nature as well as false to the Bible. The need 
to know and to know truly is as deep within us 
and as God-given as need of prayer, or the power 
of faith. It is a divine compulsion to inquire 
and distinguish — that is, to criticize — which is 
laid upon the mind. Whatever may have been 
the case in other times, to-day frank and honest 
criticism is a necessity for the church's life. The 
work of the Higher Criticism is to save the moral 
and spiritual teaching of the Bible from being 
thrown overboard with so much of its history 



THE AIM OF CRITICISM 23 1 

and science. It distinguishes between the shell 
and the pearl, between the earthen vessel and 
the treasure it holds, between the letter and the 
spirit, between that which is of time and earth 
in the record, and that which is of heaven and 
eternity. Criticism, then, is a sacred obligation. 
It has in view a thoroughly positive end — to see 
truth as it is, freed from all accretions of time 
and place and partial knowledge. The Higher 
Criticism is a superior method of interpretation, 
a better road to the original teaching of Bible 
writers ; it is the mental process whereby the 
true nature of Bible teaching is appreciated and 
manifested. It seeks to know the Bible from 
within and along the lines of its own meaning 
and purpose. Our duty to the Bible is different 
from that of our fathers, since each age is bound 
to interpret it in terms of its own experience, 
and in the light of its own intellectual as well as 
spiritual culture. We are called by criticism to 
a better understanding of the Bible than was 
possible in any earher age. And the result 
is a Bible more vivid and richer in spiritual 
suggestion than the Bible our fathers knew — 
a book which is the autobiography of religion 
on earth, the record of the unfolding of man's 
spiritual nature, traversing all the distance from 
the lowest barbarism to the highest spiritual 
civilization under the inspiration of Jesus. 



332 THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

: The changed view of the Bible brought about 
by criticism makes immensely for faith. The 
loss of the old view is, I know, to many most 
painful. It was a real comfort to their hearts 
to believe that they had a book which contained 
the infallible word of God. It was a comfort 
to believe that they could open this book and 
find a ready solution of all the problems that 
otherwise would be so troublesome. It was much 
to believe that they had here, from beginning to 
end, a transcript of the Divine mind. All that 
they have lost. But are there no gains ? Is 
not the Bible coming back to us in another way 
as the grandest book in the world ? It is coming 
back to us as a record of the aspirations, failings, 
sins, and strivings of a great race specially 
endowed with the genius for religion. It is return- 
ing to us as a human book, glowing with human 
fervour, thrilling with human hope, warm with 
human affection, inspired with the story of 
man's effort to get into right relationship with 
God. We are no longer responsible for its 
mistakes. We are not troubled to reconcile its 
contradictions. We have no longer to defend 
that in it which is indefensible. It is coming 
back to us as the greatest rehgious Hterature 
of mankind ; a book profitable for doctrine, 
for correction, for instruction in the great deep 
things , of righteousness, love, and peace ; a 



THE WORK OF CHANGE 233 

book we read as the history of our race along 
the religious line. 

So all the changes wrought in men's ideas by 
science, history, criticism, right reason, scholar- 
ship, and a growing humanity — changes which 
to many seem only loss, are really so much gain ; 
they take away something but they give us in 
clearness, in surety, and in hopefulness more 
than they take away. Much is pulled down, but 
it is that a fairer building may rise out of the ruins. 
It is as Oliver Wendell Holmes has sung : — 

The waves unbuild the wasting shore 

Where mountains towered, the billows sweep. 

Yet still their borrowed spoils restore, 
And raise new empires from the deep. 

So while the floods of thought lay waste 

The old domain of chartered creeds, 
The heaven-appointed tides will haste 

To shape new homes for human needs. 

Be ours to mark with hearts unchilled 
The change our outworn age deplores ; 

The legend sinks, but faith shall build 
A fairer throne on new-found shores. 

The star shall glow in western skies 

That shone o'er Bethlehem's hallowed shrine, 

And here a fairer temple rise 

Than crowned the rock of Palestine. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proce 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date; May 2005 

PreservationTechnologii 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATI 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



